This is the first chapter in my new novel, What the Tide Leaves Behind. Copyright Malcolm McDowell Woods.
1.
Thomas wriggled in the passenger seat, all the time keeping his eyes on the long black estate car in front of them and, in front of that, the wee, black-suited man standing straight and proper, with a bowler hat on his head and a golden staff held aloft with his left hand.
Beside him, his sister snorted. “Christ, a lot of bother, init? Can’t imagine mum up for all this fuss.”
She was probably right, but that was beside the point. This was Ginny poking at him, expressing her own dissatisfaction with the arrangements Thomas had made.
The sleek, tall station wagon in front of them held their mother’s body. She had passed a little more than a week ago, Thomas getting the call from the hospice on a Sunday morning that she was gone, that the most essential of her failing organs had finally succumbed and stopped beating.
“It’s awful news, sure, but her end was peaceful, passing in her sleep like that,” the nurse from the hospice had said. Aye, Thomas had replied, because that felt like the thing you’d say in that situation, but how could she know? Did she go quietly into the night? How could anyone know?
The death was unexpected – a shock. Helen was just 65. A stroke. Out at her cottage in Donegal.
The first responders rushed her fading body to a small hospital in Letterkenny but immediately decided that the regional one in Derry offered better care for her. It didn’t matter. The stroke had been major, catastrophic and his mother never regained consciousness. After a week, Thomas made the decision to move her to the hospice. They were better suited to tend to the needs of a body as it completed its time on Earth.
“Here we go. About time!” Her sister started the rental car and Thomas looked up to see the man with the staff slowly walk down the center of the street, leading the funeral procession. Thomas was a bit puzzled. The crematorium was more than an hour’s drive away, surely they weren’t going to do the drive at a walking pace? But while he mulled that, the procession reached the end of the street and the man stepped aside, gesturing to the small train of cars to turn right, beginning their drive to Belfast.
The journey took them over high hills where the houses, trees and shrubbery gave way to gorse, heather and sheep. Thomas gazed out as though he was in a foreign land, and he was, to an extent. The few times he had ventured to Belfast it was mostly by train, which hugged the north coast and avoided the highlands.
The drive was mostly quiet. Ginny, normally a loquacious type, had fallen silent once they’d reached the main road, and Thomas let her be. She had arrived just yesterday, from Australia, had driven this very route in reverse just last night, and was likely exhausted.
Perhaps she was feeling remorse, he wondered. Remorse at having left Derry – and their mother – years earlier to move with her husband to Scotland, which was bad enough but still just a ferry away – and then to Australia four years ago. Australia, the other end of the world, their mother had said. Perhaps you’ll both come visit some day, Ginny had said then, before she and her husband William climbed into the taxi and drove off.
They all knew it would never happen. Their mother was a loner and was more than happy to spend her remaining days at her home overlooking the flinty Atlantic, watching the storms blow in and the ships pass by.
As for Thomas? Well, apparently, there had only been so much ambition to pass on to the children and it went to Ginny. Or perhaps growing up in the Troubles had affected Thomas more than Ginny somehow. His only ambition was to be left alone. When their mother had declared, five years ago, that she was moving out of the family home in Derry to a new house in the Republic, Thomas had his job at the bookstore bumped from part time to full time and found a tiny furnished apartment in the city proper.
He shelved books, mostly, occasionally ringing up sales when Mrs. Caldwell took her lunch. But the job let him be. He could spend hours alone with the books, carefully filing them and restocking when needed. His memory was encyclopedic, he knew where every volume could be found. That wee paperback on the historic ruins of Donegal? He knew. That science fiction novel about the alien vampires? He could put his finger on it within seconds.
Meanwhile, his sister had gotten divorced (“A privileged feck. I’m glad to be free of him.”) and quickly announced that no, she would not be coming home to Derry with her tail between her legs. No, she was staying on in Sydney, where she had become a quite successful real estate broker. (“I’ll have to have ye’s out here soon.”)
Thomas saw his mother infrequently. While the drive to her new home was little more than an hour away by car, Thomas had never learned to drive, and the two-bus ride made for a several hour trip each way.
Ellen purchased a former holiday cottage, a small single-level, whitewashed structure on the side of a long, gradual slope that tumbled down to a short, gently curved bay that resembled the letter C slowly uncurled. The move had been a surprise. Neither Thomas or his sister had any idea she had been setting money aside for years after Thomas’s father had died. Her getaway had been a private plan.
Charlie McKay’s life was unremarkable life until its very end. He inherited the family newsagents shop on Strand Road, Derry’s main street. He married the shy young woman he rescued from a drunk on the train to Portrush one holiday weekend and fathered two children, one an intense, fire-brand girl who strained to escape her home, her school and eventually, her country, and the other a quiet, timid boy who saw the conflict and hid rather than run.
If Thomas had been shy and withdrawn as a young child, his introspection was cemented in 1996, when his father became infamous as a last, final victim of the troubles. A small incendiary device blew up in his hands as he was attempting to carry it from the cramped store. Packed as it always was with newspapers and magazines, the shop took up the fire with great alacrity. Charlie was dead. Helen was a widow. Thomas was six.
*
He missed it! A flash of light caught his eye, likely a reflection from a car driving through the crematorium parking lot just outside the non-denominational stained glass windows of the – what – the hall? He turned to look at it and became distracted by the pattern in the windows, of a bucolic, spiritually safe scene of rolling green fields under a brilliant blue sky, and when he looked back, the Reverend Mary was walking away from the pulpit and the coffin of his late mother had descended along with its raised platform and disappeared from view. She was gone. When he’d leave the crematorium, after the wee set up of tea and biscuits with family and friends and the endless condolences and small talk, when Ginny would jet back to Australia, he’d move into his mother’s empty house.
It only made sense, his sister told him, and he had to agree. The empty house was empty and would need looking after until they could sell it, which could take a year or more in this economy. Ginny would pay him, forwarding him money for food and other basic living expenses until the house sold and then deducting that from his share of the proceeds. “You can’t keep the job. Even if you could drive, it’s too much to do every fucking day, and let’s be honest, the job’s a dead-end. Bookstores are dinosaurs. You have to catch yourself on, Tommy, you’re nearly 30. You know, in a way, this is a gift. You get maybe a year to decide what the hell you’ll do.”
They planned a tea and biscuit reception, as anyone attending the service had likely driven considerable distance. The Belfast crematorium was the only one in Northern Ireland, an hour or more drive for most everyone here. Thomas was happy for the food, indeed would have devoured more formidable offerings if they’d have been available. He hadn’t eaten yet and was anticipating that they’d stop on the drive back for a proper lunch.
There were sausage rolls, small sandwiches, pats on the back and firm handshakes. “It’s a terrible thing, Thomas.” “Aye, ‘tis. You’ll miss her, sure.”
Well, not that much. Not really. He was a loner, much like her.
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