Issue 3 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

I'd only spoken it once. "Moira, and my son Brian."
"Take off those wet coats and have your tea,"
Moira said, collecting more plates and cups from a shelf.
Ivor hung the coats side by side near the stove. I wondered
whether Moira was the wife of the father or the
wife of the son: she looked the right age for neither. Her
body was young and slight, but her dark hair had a
patch of gray above each ear, as a cat might be marked,
and her face was gently lined.
"Kate's American."
The son smiled. "That's grand. Where in
America?"
"Philadelphia."
"The Liberty Bell."
"That's right."
"There's a crack in it, so I believe—like this cup."
"Sure there's no crack in that cup, Brian." Moira
was buttering slices of wheaten bread.
"Aye, there is, I can feel it."
"Well if there is, it's a wee one, and never mind."
She passed a plate of sausages around and a dish of
fried potatoes.
Brian's fingers traced the edge of the cup. He had
strong white hands, and his face was smooth and white
too. His eyes made me think of fever: bright blue, but
somehow cloudy. "Did you study about the Liberty Bell
at school?" I asked him, to make conversation.
The shake of his head was almost imperceptible.
"Brian doesn't study. Brian's blind," Moira said.
"I'm very stupid."
"I hear about things on the wireless," Brian said.
Moira gave me a brief glance—yes, you are stupid, it
said—and she picked up an orange and peeled it and
divided it into sections. But when she passed the orange
on the plate to Ivor rather than to Brian, my feeling of
confusion increased. She turned away from me. "Did
you sell all the mats, Ivor?"
"Aye." He picked a bottle of whiskey out of a cupboard
and poured himself a glass. "It's not a job I
fancy."
30
"Tell me about America," Brian said. Moira
brought the plates to the sink and scraped them.
I thought it best to start from the inside out, because
when you are blind you grope from sensation to
abstraction. Or that's how it seemed to me. "The pavements
are hard, people shove into you, even a cracked
bell has a clearer sound than street noises. They're all
mixed up. The smells, too. Nothing clear."
He smiled politely, and that's not the reaction I
wanted. Moira was now making up a folding cot next to
the fire in the front room. I supposed it was for me. But
no, I had to sleep in a proper bed, she told me.
At the top of the stairs were two bedrooms. It
turned out to be Brian who was displaced, who stayed
downstairs on the cot.
There were pictures of sailing ships on Brian's wall.
As I was falling asleep I heard voices in the next room:
Ivor's tight and bitter, and Moira's a flat monotonous
undertone. I slept under layer upon layer of wool flannel
coverlet.
When I came down in the morning I found Brian in
the kitchen. He was drinking tea. "My father went to
bed with the bottle last night. Moira's at Mass."
His face revealed nothing, but I was not so sure
about my own voice. "Does that mean he won't be
going to Belfast this morning?"
He shrugged. "Tomorrow maybe."
The situation was different now; I felt like a spade
forgotten in the garden and left to rust. Or maybe not
anything so useful as a spade. There was no way I could
hitch from here, far off the main road.
"Do you mind staying?"
"The trouble is, there's nothing I can do for you in
return."
He tapped a hard-boiled egg on the side of his bowl
and removed the shell so that it was hardly cracked. He
finished eating before he said, "There might be something
you could do for me."
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