My Coney Island Baby by Billy O'Callaghan

Author:Billy O'Callaghan [O'Callaghan, Billy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

V

Leave-taking

After the dreams have come, the mornings feel like glass around him. Everything looks too bright, too well preserved. Michael’s way of coping is to sit at the kitchen table in silence and try to wait it out. The details of Inishbofin seem layered into the early hour, like an otherworldly second skin, and he fights against closing his eyes so he won’t have to acknowledge the faces that hang there, in that darkness, ready to loom, faces that will make him smile to see again but which will also bring deep sadness, because of how they’ve been lost and long since let go. The house is always still then, silent apart from the acceptable sounds, the clicking of pipes in the walls, water running at a murmur, the paper-weight of his own breath and Barbara’s as she idles about small chores, maybe rain against the glass or the crack of snow shifting its weight on the roof. While the coffee percolates, he sits and tries not to move or even think, knowing too well the traps and pitfalls that lie in those directions.

He likes to watch Barbara buttering toast. It’s a small thing, but it softens the solitude. She scrapes the slices with a knife, then cuts them into triangles. Her hands have always been delicate, gentle, yet she’s good with a knife. And knowing, too, because the angle of the cut seems to matter to the bread’s taste. It all goes beyond simple logic. At this stage of their lives, solidly middle-aged, they have dug their rut. On the surface, it’s not so bad. In a lit kitchen, Queens can be almost anywhere, and the missing things somehow count for less. The butter is a chemically correct shade of yellow and easily spread, but is actually a type of low-salt-content, sunflower-oil substitute. All along its packaging it boasts in outright lies about the remarkably comparable qualities of its taste. But butter and this stuff only look the same, and appearances will almost always deceive. And, in keeping with this trend, the bread is not real bread either, at least not Michael’s definition of real. Finger-thick slices the colour and flavour of dust, with an elasticity that bloats with every chew and which leaves grains of itself on his tongue and in his teeth even after swallowing. Lately, Barb has been pushing for a switch to one of those pro-biotic spreads. The change will make no great difference, since it is all just pseudo-magic anyway, and empty promises, and he’ll probably give in, but not yet, because he is stubborn. Healthy diets are all the rage, even among the dying, but he still holds out on a few of the details.

With his attention fixed on such minutiae, entire weeks, months even, can pass without him remembering when the song of the whole world was nothing but the rumble of late-returning boats and the gulls incessant in their screams against the whispering slop of Inishbofin’s tide. Or how it felt

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