Eamon Doggett . Things changed when Adrian’s father grew ill. They had been a family of few words, much left unsaid, and what was said was done to confuse.
In this way, they set puzzles for the other: they were fine when sad and nodded when they meant to shake their heads. Nor were they an emotional family in words, physical affection or obvious gestures. But their language and actions became direct and plain when the doctor told them that the cancer spreading around James’ body would kill him within two months.
Adrian fell on his father’s chest and told him he loved him. James’ four children and his wife did the same. It was the only time Adrian could remember his father crying.
They were all crying. There was some embarrassment in this, especially when Diana, Adrian’s mother, took tissues from her handbag and passed them around. Yet, saying the word aloud encouraged them to say it repeatedly until they had worn it out by James’ death six weeks later.
#1: (noun) An ineffable charge between beings that loses its power when tried in words. Two years later, Adrian, having been single for most of his life, met Heather through an online dating application. He saw pictures of her and pressed a button to say that he liked them, and she saw pictures of him and pressed a button to say she liked them.
A match was made in this way. Over coffee, they talked about their families. Heather’s parents were divorced and lived thousands of miles apart, but there was no ill feeling—a teenage romance that couldn’t be kept alive any longer.
When Heather got home to America, she would try to visit her parents: her mother and brother in upstate New York and her father and his partner in Nashville, Tennessee. She offered a few details about their persons. Her mother had started making craft paper, some of which Heather had brought back to Ireland.
Her father was working long hours to build a business, a food distribution company. They talked of things they liked: books, music, TV shows, and travelling. This was one of her favourite places, she told him, as they walked the Rine, a small coastal spit on the south side of Galway Bay.
Heather wore black jeans, black walking boots and a purple rain jacket, while Adrian wore a polo shirt, denim jeans and runners that kept slipping off the same rocks she easily negotiated. It was something to laugh about. She picked plants from the ground for him to taste.
One tasted like cucumber and another like liquorice. Then she named the plants. He listened and tried to remember their names.
She also named parts of the bay and distinctive things in the distance: a castle, a headland, a tower, Inis Mór, Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr. She saw it more vividly than Adrian as she understood language as a way of seeing the world. His thoughts were more tangential.
The sheening rocks reminded him of coals – the same powdered jewels his family stored in a bunker at the back of the house. They are a bit like coals, Adrian said to Heather. Yes, she said.
Maybe not as glossy, however. Adrian’s job during childhood was to fetch buckets of coal for the fire. All too often, though, he let it go dark outside and had to rely on the sound of the blade scraping along the bed of the bunker and feel the strain of the load moving from his lower arms to his biceps.
When he carried the coal inside, it blackened further against the living room’s pastel colours and his parents’ white skin. He and Heather walked until they stood on the lip of a rock that hung over the ocean. He said that the sky was enormous.
She smiled and agreed. Then they turned around and went back the way they had come. Heather was a landscape painter.
She had walked all of the country’s coastline. When she was walking the landscape, she imagined its painterly forms, she told him, and when she was in the studio, she imagined being in the landscape. Her house was at the end of a narrow lane surrounded by fields.
There were various tractors and pieces of farming equipment in the garden. Heather said her landlord did a bit of everything: farming, fishing, singing, and gardening. She and Adrian drank tea sitting in two armchairs angled to face each other, with blankets draped over their top rails.
The windows, which they kept looking towards out of nervousness, showed terraced hills stained black with rain. She told him that the same hills could become pink after a day’s sunshine. That night Adrian looked at pictures of Heather’s paintings on her website and marvelled at the play of colours that made absolute things – the sea and the mountains – seem dissoluble.
His favourite, titled ‘Coastline Story I’, melded beach, sand and water together, making the physical world look vulnerable—bruised, even, after a trauma. There are endless lilts of blue in the world, he declared the next time he saw her. She laughed.
What? Sorry, she said, smirking, you are right, and then she began to name some of them. Coral, Teal, Cyan. #2: (noun) a phenomenon whose mode is to spill, pervade and erase all subtlety; all-consuming.
Adrian’s father, James, was placed in palliative care for the final weeks of his life. His hospital room had a bed, a table, two chairs and a television. It was part of the original wing of the hospital and retained remnants of the past: gaudy wallpaper lined the walls, a crucifix hung from the door, and a nun visited James when learning that he was dying.
I can tell you have been a hard worker, she said to him. As was his lifetime routine, James got up early to shower each morning. Then he had breakfast, which in the hospital turned into a fondness for tea and toast, and then, the doctors and nurses visited him for tests, medicine, and conversation.
When this was done, he would call his wife Diana to tell her he was free to visit if she liked. Adrian and the rest of the family visited in the evenings after finishing work. They listened to the rhythms and rituals of the hospital he had learned.
There is a man, he told them, who wheels his medical trolley up and down the hallway at the same time every day; a Filipino nurse who sends half of her wages home; a child who has been in the hospital for over a year; and James laughed when telling them how his sister, June, a former nurse, had scolded the nurses on duty for neglecting him. It is terrible, Adrian’s mother commented. They didn’t come around for four hours today.
They must be understaffed, James said. When his condition deteriorated, James had Diana create excuses to prevent the children from seeing him. Instead, they had to rely on reports from their mother, who came home late at night, ate half her dinner and took a sleeping tablet.
James decided he wanted to come home for his final days, and night nurses were organised to afford Diana some sleep. She did the work during the daytime: dressing him, washing his hair, and giving him his medicine. Most of that time Adrian can’t collate and discern any linearity, nor can he describe with any material details its happenings.
Still, he can see his mother asking everyone to leave the bedroom so that she could pump his father’s stomach of the collecting fluid. #3: (noun) An unconscious duty to act wholly in service of another; a stirring towards movement. Heather liked to go on walks around the Burren.
She knew all the trails, the branded ones with wooden signposts, gravel paths and warning signs for steep edges, and others of little repute that were no more than grass combed over by many feet. The only time Adrian remembers her lost was when searching for a secluded beach she had heard tales of. She was ready to abandon the search when the beach – a pocket of sand that showed itself when the tide was out – came into view, looking impossible among the hard rocks.
The water was cold until it became warm. She dived under the water and came up with eyes big and clear. He kissed her.
Then, they lay on their backs to feel the water differently. Adrian saw his father diving into the sea before coming up with the brown and grey hairs on his chest holding fat beads of water. They were framed by mountains to the south, east and west, while to the north was the bay and Galway City.
After drying and putting on their clothes, they drove to her house and showered together, washing the other with soap. She moaned when he soaped between her legs. Then she bent over, pressing her palms against the tiled wall, and guided him inside her.
When they stepped out of the bathtub, they looked at sand gathered in clumps, brown and muddy, conditioning the water. #4: (verb) Nostalgic; the act of beautifying remnants of the past. Around the time Adrian met Heather, his mother met another man.
Graeme was a part-time funeral director after a career in the guards. They saw each other on weekends: restaurants, drives, walks, and concerts. Then they began seeing each other most days.
Things progressed quickly. Adrian came home one weekend and saw flowers Graeme had left his mother with a note of his love. Adrian and his siblings struggled to process their mother seeing another man.
They tried to create a monster out of Graeme to protect their father’s memory. He was egotistical and conniving, dull and morbid. Their father would have wanted this, and their father would have wanted that.
There were arguments over semantics. You can’t love someone you have only known for a few months. It’s not love.
You are craving company. Love was this, and love was that. #5: (noun) A beauty dependent on its precarity and irreproducibility; of substances coagulating synchronously Heather invited Adrian to accompany her to her friend’s wedding at a castle perched over a river.
They watched the groom, Isaac, whose long hair was tied up to show his handsome face, taking his place under an awning of cloth suspended in the air by the branches of a tree. Bethany, the bride, was equally handsome as she walked with her father down an aisle of sun-polished grass. It was a sweltering day.
The wedding celebrant said warm things about life and love as the couple stared at each other. Everyone smiled at the sentiments, and some had tears in their eyes. People stood under the crowns of trees.
Once the couple were married, they walked back down the aisle, and people clapped, greedy for their attention. Adrian and Heather drank champagne on the lawn and talked with people. An oyster farmer told them about oysters.
Melissa, one of Heather’s friends, said she had met someone and was meeting him the following day for lunch. They were pleased for her. Staff hired by the castle went around with plates of delicate food.
Lunch turned into dinner, and a band appeared on the castle terrace. Adrian and Heather sat on a wall and watched the bride and groom sit on chairs hoisted into the air by the groomsmen. When the band finished, the music started inside.
People danced. Adrian and Heather began to get drunk. Everyone was.
Heather’s friend Melissa lay down on the dancefloor when her new boyfriend stopped responding to her calls and messages. Heather told Adrian to help lift her friend off the floor, but she didn’t want to be picked up. She told them she wasn’t sure what she was doing with her life.
She was nearly forty, she said. Heather told Adrian to mind Melissa while she got her some water. Melissa told them to leave her alone.
The following morning Adrian and Heather walked around the grounds and tried to read the other’s silence. When they returned to the castle, the married couple appeared in casual clothes to eat breakfast together. People were talking about how they were going to spend the day.
Bethany, the bride, gave everyone a hamper of gifts – salts, bath soaps, postcards – to remind them of the weekend. Adrian and Heather said goodbye to the married couple and to the people they knew and had got to know. The sun shone in pulses as they held hands while walking back to the car.
He turned on the ignition, and she reached behind her for the seatbelt. They drove slowly out of the castle grounds. She adjusted the air conditioning.
They both wondered how long it would last and thought how strange it was to form these unions. #6: (noun) A state nurtured over time by repetition and familiarity; a pressing of an accumulation of layers One Sunday, they parked at the beach to walk across the road towards the hills. She led them across a stream and up a steep bank to an expanse of stony fields.
Wanting to seem spontaneous, he offered to piggyback her part of the way. She giggled as she climbed onto a rock to climb onto his back. The land they walked rose towards the sky until they reached the crescent peak and could look down at an ocean made more beautiful by a headland jutting out into its soupy water.
It’s really beautiful, they kept saying. They looked at the ocean as they walked parallel to the coastline. It’s the sea on the other side of the country, he said to her.
Ocean is a much more powerful word. It makes me feel light-headed. She said, I didn’t see an ocean or a sea until I was a teenager.
This seemed impossible to him. She slowed her walk at certain spots, raised the camera to her eyes and twisted the lens to focus the image. He wanted her to take hundreds of pictures, thinking of all the paintings she could make of them.
But she was selective and looked unimpressed at the pictures the camera framed. At the peak, they took a break. She took pictures of him facing the camera, with his back to the ocean, and then he did the same for her.
The camera, which hung around her neck, was like a character of its own. Do you ever include people in your paintings? He asked her. Sometimes but never explicitly.
I like to suggest them. He held her hand, enjoying this idea because this was how the world appeared to him: amorphous, unfinished, provisional. They did a lap around the mountain, skirting its base, before walking downhill again towards the ocean.
He tried to think of the words to best evoke the dramatics of the rocks, the sea, the sky, and the whole lot. They both worried that they would never feel the charge of the lived moment, that all was happening too consciously. It’s really beautiful, one of them said again.
They went to a restaurant that evening and talked about the day. When the food came, they enjoyed sharing it and the intimacy of its communion. He liked to pour the wine, beginning with her glass and then his own.
It is very nice, she said. People were about them: younger and older. When their conversation slowed, they both tried to revive it and put on a kind of performance.
She showed him pictures of their walk and their smiles frozen in time and place. He asked her to send him the photos to look at on his phone. They went on a holiday to Portugal.
They followed Google Maps to steep steps that led to a castle overlooking the pretty town. They attended a performance by local musicians. They shopped in the local food market.
They ran into the sea and jumped into the waves. They wandered about the town and drank cheap bottles of beer. Then they reasoned they needed to hear live music and found a pub with a man playing the guitar.
Adrian started to hum along to some of the songs, but Heather complained that she felt sick and needed fresh air. Are you okay? He asked her. Yeah, I think so, she said.
They kept walking until they were retracing earlier steps. Eventually, they wandered into a café and bought some custard tarts they ate on a wooden bench. She said she was worried but didn’t know what of.
He nodded. She said she wanted to sleep and see how she felt afterwards. He agreed it was a good idea.
After sleeping for an hour, they showered and dressed for dinner. At a restaurant, over another meal, they were happy to fall into a conversation with a couple sitting parallel to them. Adam and Gene were retired and told Adrian and Heather the other restaurants they needed to try.
One of them did the best pork. It seemed important, then, that they tried it, too. The walk back to the apartment was done holding hands.
Neither of them had used the word. #7: (Noun) Of a system of feelings based on differences, each feeling existing only by its relations to opposing feelings. Adrian was invited to another wedding.
This one was in the autumn. Adrian’s sister, Runa, was the maid of honour to her best friend, Yvonne, and in the absence of his father, Adrian was invited as the guest of his mother, who knew Yvonne and her parents. The ceremony was at a small Anglican church.
Adrian sat beside his mother and read the mass card. He pointed out one of the songs to her. ‘Pachelbel’s Canon in D – one of Dad’s favourites,’ he said.
The groom was an army sergeant dressed in a dark green uniform. The bride was a school principal dressed in a white dress. The pair of them trained together for marathons.
The reception was at a hotel. Drinks were served. Adrian and his mother talked to Runa’s boyfriend and a Chilean man, whose girlfriend was a friend of Runa’s and a fellow bridesmaid.
When they were alone, Adrian’s mother told Adrian how much his father would have enjoyed this occasion. Adrian counted how many times she mentioned his father as he waited for her to mention Graeme. After, they joined a table of strangers at dinner.
Adrian’s mother talked to a retired teacher while Adrian gulped the wine. Speeches were made. Dessert was served.
People began to dance. With Runa’s bridesmaid duties over, she could join her family. They did some dancing – Adrian twirling his sister round and round until she made him stop.
He was drunk and slurring his words, and when his mother tried to persuade him to go to bed, he brought up Graeme. You have chosen this man over the family, he said. Adrian’s mother grew upset and left for her hotel room.
His sister said she agreed with him, and everyone kept dancing. He phoned Heather to tell her what had happened. I’ve messed up, he said to her.
My family are falling apart. My father was the pin, the keystone. It’s okay, she said.
Are you sure? Yes. I love you, he said. Don’t say that now.
Why? You are drunk. But I mean it. Well, I do, too.
Good. That’s good. The following morning Adrian woke up with a terrible hangover and apologised to his mother at breakfast.
She said it was the alcohol, and it was okay. Runa ate with them before driving back to Dublin with her boyfriend. It left Adrian and his mother to travel back to the family home together.
‘This could be your last time in the house,’ his mother said as they pulled into the driveway. ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ Adrian said. The house was nearly empty of furniture and belongings in anticipation of his mother’s move to a smaller home.
Some of their things had been sold, but most of it was waiting in a storage unit until the move was complete. Adrian walked into his bedroom to find only a mattress on the floor while his mother was using his wardrobe to hang her clothes. He thought of his father, whose bedroom was opposite his, and then of his mother pumping the fluid out of his father’s stomach, and then of a moment, many years previous, when Adrian, the second youngest in the family, went to live in America.
For the whole journey to the airport, he and his father barely said a word to each other, but there was a feeling between them that sustained to the security gates, where his father, panicking that his son didn’t have a watch, took off his own and put it on his son’s wrist. On the plane, Adrian looked at the watch and then at the clouds and the sky. The woman beside him asked if he was okay.
He spent the night at home. His mother told him Graeme was a nice man and would like to meet the family. Adrian said okay.
His mother smiled. She made cups of tea that they held in both hands. On cardboard boxes, she had written labels: photographs, glassware, clothes, books, CDs and cables.
He helped her move boxes into her car. Then he drank beers to help him sleep. Adrian cut the grass the following morning before driving to his apartment.
He had lots of things he needed to do. The dishes needed to be cleaned. The cupboard under the sink needed tidying.
He needed to find his diary and plan for the rest of the year. But for a while he just sat and thought of a man. The man has a broad face, and his eyes are set into deep hollows.
He is sitting alone at the recess of an opening, a cave, probably. The man, a caveman, is looking at his hands and thinking hard. There is a woman and a feeling.
The cave gathers all – the surrounding hills, forests and greens – into its milky orbit. He rose from his seat and filled the bathroom sink for a shave. The water was soft.
He held a towel against his face for a long time. #8: (Noun) A suggestion, a story to be told and retold; a space between the word and thing. .
. . Eamon Doggett is from County Meath in Ireland and has had short stories published in The Irish Times and Prick of the Spindle .
He was the 2019 Hennessy First Fiction Award winner and the inaugural Sylvia O’Brien Prize joint winner. He recently completed a Practice-Based PhD at the University of Galway and hopes to publish a short story collection in the near future. To discover more content exclusive to our print and digital editions, subscribe here to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.
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