Bend for Home, The by Dermot Healy

minute. He crossed the floor holding the vessel. I lay there, as the other world came rushing back, feeling like I’d just come out of confession.
    Daddy, I said.
    What’s that?
    I feel better now.
    Good, he said, good.
    *
    It might have been then, or soon after this, there was some other sickness I can’t name. Maybe it wasn’t a sickness at all but some nightmare that visits a body during waking hours. It meant the closing walls again and the body ridding itself of its physical presence.
    There would have been a radio on downstairs in the living room. There was always a radio on in the Milseanacht Breifne. The wireless itself sat in the sitting room above Main Street and a wire from it ran downstairs to the sweet shop, along the wall of the café behind, and eventually into a speaker in the small living room that separated the restaurant from the kitchen. The radio played all day non-stop from the moment Aunt Maisie switched it on at noon when she rose from her bed till the National Anthem blared out onto Main Street bringing another day to an end.
    That night the voice of the announcer came out the window through the green bars, travelled up the entry and reached me in the room above, where I lay weightless and transparent.
    What the voice was speaking of I can’t say. It was adult, male, nostalgic; it could have been James Mason; it might have been PerryMason; maybe a member of a religious order speaking of acts of charity or a voice about to announce a waltz; whatever it was, it troubled me.
    At first, as always, there was the benign sense of sleep falling while I listened to life going on downstairs. I heard the ladies going away to the pictures and knew my father was down there alone.
    I had this fear that he might tie his bad tooth to the door handle, and push the door. He’d done this once before and when we walked into the dining room he had a bloody handkerchief to his mouth, and the long fang, yellow and topped with black, sat in a saucer. But tonight all was quiet except for the voice on the radio.
    I was walking up Finea then the wrong thing happened, and I screamed. I screamed again. I heard his hurrying steps coming up the stairs and along the landing. By the time he threw open the door and turned on the light he was breathless and pale.
    Where is he, son? he shouted.
    Blessed God, son, he said hoarsely, what’s wrong?
    I couldn’t say. He held the bottom rails of the bed and looked round wildly. His gasps for breath left two pinches of blue on his upper cheeks.
    What is it? he said, where is he?
    But there was no one.
    I was afraid, I said.
    Afraid of what?
    I couldn’t answer.
    I thought, he said, you were being murdered.
    I must have lain down then, and turned my head sideways.
    There’s no one, he said.
    Yes, Daddy.
    I’ll turn the light off now, he said.
    He turned it off but I could feel him standing there in the dark for a long time, watching me, ready for the next scream when it came.
    *
    And another time he caught me walking in my sleep across the landing. He’d been to a whist drive in the side rooms of the Town Hall, and then on to see Frankie Brady in the Ulster Arms for a fewbottles of Guinness, and then he’d let himself into the dark hall and caught sight of me standing in my pyjamas by the altar at the top of the stairs.
    What are you doing up there? he asked.
    I didn’t reply.
    Dermot? he said.
    I put a hand out and touched the walls and began to feel my way down the steps. He approached me warily.
    Are you asleep? he said, and his voice reached me from another dimension.
    I struggled best as I could to stop going wherever I was going. I really wanted to go on very much to that first place and there was a sense of loss in not reaching it. Now I was losing it very fast.
    What’s wrong? my mother said from somewhere below.
    I caught him, said my father, just in time.
    Dermot? she said.
    Don’t wake him, he advised. They say you shouldn’t wake them suddenly.
    I could feel the