MONTGOMERY:
I do. Would you care for a drink? Trolley’s coming up the aisle.
MRS. MACNEILL:
Oh, please. Gin and bitter lemon for me. Should cut it out, but I reckon when you add up the harm it does and the good, it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. Now, what was I saying? Oh yes, do you think children ever forgive their parents for dying? When you’re wee, your parents are like God; I remember mine, God love ‘em, they could do nothing wrong, they were as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar and always would be, but they both died in the bombing in ‘41 and, do you know, Doctor, but I don’t know if I ever forgave them? They’d built my life, they’d given me everything, and then it was as if they’d abandoned me, and I’m wondering if my Michael and Christine and wee Richard will think the same about me. Will they think I’ve betrayed them, or will I have given them that kick up the backside into being mature? What do you think, Dr. Montgomery? Do children ever forgive their parents for being human?
DR. MONTGOMERY:
Mrs. MacNeill, I don’t know. I just don’t know.
(The drinks trolley arrives at seats 28C and D at the same instant as the Boeing 757 makes the subtle change of altitude that marks the commencement of its descent to snowbound Northern Ireland.)
* * * *
SHE HAD WISHED upon a star, the star around which her son orbits, a shooting star, fast and low and bright, diving down behind Divis Mountain. When you wish upon a star, doesn’t matter who you are, everything your heart desires will come to you: a cricket had sung that to her once upon a rainy Saturday afternoon in the sixties somewhen, but what if that star is a satellite or an Army helicopter, does that invalidate the wish, does that fold the heart’s desire back on itself and leave it staring at its reflection in the night-mirrored window? The night outside fills the reflection’s cheeks with shadows, and, in the desperate warmth of the hospital room heavy with the scent of sickness, she hugs herself and knows that she is the reflection and it the object. Every night the hollows fill up again with shadows from the shadowland outside where Army Saracens roar through the night and joyriders hot-wire Fords to cruise the wee small hours away round the neat gravel paths of the City Cemetery or stake their lives running the checkpoints manned by weary police reservists watching from the backs of steel-gray Landrovers with loaded rifles.
Stick them in neutral; he’d told her that once. We do that sometimes, stick the Landrovers in neutral and cruise for a couple of hundred yards, then shove them into second, and when they backfire it sounds like gunshots. Gets them ringing up the station: shots heard, Tennant Street, 1:15 A.M. Some of them make it sound like Custer’s Last Stand, he’d said. It had made her laugh, once. Last Stand in Shadowland.
Somewhere in the room is the soul of a twelve-year-old boy, somewhere among the piles of junk Dr. Montgomery had suggested might trigger some response from him. Sometimes she thinks she sees it, like an imp, or like one of the brownies her mother had convinced her had lived behind the dresser in the farmhouse’s kitchen: an imp, darting from under his American football helmet to hide behind his U2 poster, concealed like a lost chord in the strings of his guitar or looping endlessly through his computer like the ghost of an abandoned program. There are his favorite U2 albums, and the cassettes specially recorded for him by John Cleese to try and raise a smile on his face; there is the photograph of Horace, half-collie, half-greyhound, wall-eyed and wild-willed; there is the photograph of Tom senior.
Tom senior, who knew all about backfiring police Landrovers, and the room at the station with the ghettoblaster turned up loud outside it where they took the skinheads, and the twelve different routes to work each day: Tom, who had always been just Dad to him. No, the soul of a twelve-year-old boy,
I do. Would you care for a drink? Trolley’s coming up the aisle.
MRS. MACNEILL:
Oh, please. Gin and bitter lemon for me. Should cut it out, but I reckon when you add up the harm it does and the good, it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. Now, what was I saying? Oh yes, do you think children ever forgive their parents for dying? When you’re wee, your parents are like God; I remember mine, God love ‘em, they could do nothing wrong, they were as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar and always would be, but they both died in the bombing in ‘41 and, do you know, Doctor, but I don’t know if I ever forgave them? They’d built my life, they’d given me everything, and then it was as if they’d abandoned me, and I’m wondering if my Michael and Christine and wee Richard will think the same about me. Will they think I’ve betrayed them, or will I have given them that kick up the backside into being mature? What do you think, Dr. Montgomery? Do children ever forgive their parents for being human?
DR. MONTGOMERY:
Mrs. MacNeill, I don’t know. I just don’t know.
(The drinks trolley arrives at seats 28C and D at the same instant as the Boeing 757 makes the subtle change of altitude that marks the commencement of its descent to snowbound Northern Ireland.)
* * * *
SHE HAD WISHED upon a star, the star around which her son orbits, a shooting star, fast and low and bright, diving down behind Divis Mountain. When you wish upon a star, doesn’t matter who you are, everything your heart desires will come to you: a cricket had sung that to her once upon a rainy Saturday afternoon in the sixties somewhen, but what if that star is a satellite or an Army helicopter, does that invalidate the wish, does that fold the heart’s desire back on itself and leave it staring at its reflection in the night-mirrored window? The night outside fills the reflection’s cheeks with shadows, and, in the desperate warmth of the hospital room heavy with the scent of sickness, she hugs herself and knows that she is the reflection and it the object. Every night the hollows fill up again with shadows from the shadowland outside where Army Saracens roar through the night and joyriders hot-wire Fords to cruise the wee small hours away round the neat gravel paths of the City Cemetery or stake their lives running the checkpoints manned by weary police reservists watching from the backs of steel-gray Landrovers with loaded rifles.
Stick them in neutral; he’d told her that once. We do that sometimes, stick the Landrovers in neutral and cruise for a couple of hundred yards, then shove them into second, and when they backfire it sounds like gunshots. Gets them ringing up the station: shots heard, Tennant Street, 1:15 A.M. Some of them make it sound like Custer’s Last Stand, he’d said. It had made her laugh, once. Last Stand in Shadowland.
Somewhere in the room is the soul of a twelve-year-old boy, somewhere among the piles of junk Dr. Montgomery had suggested might trigger some response from him. Sometimes she thinks she sees it, like an imp, or like one of the brownies her mother had convinced her had lived behind the dresser in the farmhouse’s kitchen: an imp, darting from under his American football helmet to hide behind his U2 poster, concealed like a lost chord in the strings of his guitar or looping endlessly through his computer like the ghost of an abandoned program. There are his favorite U2 albums, and the cassettes specially recorded for him by John Cleese to try and raise a smile on his face; there is the photograph of Horace, half-collie, half-greyhound, wall-eyed and wild-willed; there is the photograph of Tom senior.
Tom senior, who knew all about backfiring police Landrovers, and the room at the station with the ghettoblaster turned up loud outside it where they took the skinheads, and the twelve different routes to work each day: Tom, who had always been just Dad to him. No, the soul of a twelve-year-old boy,
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