Resurrection Man by Eoin McNamee

Author:Eoin McNamee [McNamee, Eoin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Suspense
ISBN: 9780571302420
Google: 4SOhFFHXFK4C
Amazon: B00A62UJA8
Goodreads: 17695727
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 1994-12-31T11:00:00+00:00

He could not remember much about the funeral. A sense that it had been recovered from archives. The documented past painfully reconstructed and enacted to purge a troubling historical remainder. Men with weathered faces, farmers from the mountain hinterland, gathered at points along the route. Scenes of rehearsed grief. The brown coffin’s weight and awkward shapes; the resisting bulk designed to stress that death is a difficult terrain to enter.

There was rain as well. Squally cold showers that seemed to occur at crucial moments. Walking from the car to the church, darkening the sky as they stood at the graveside and carrying the priest’s voice away into a lost and ruinous place. People coughed and reached for handkerchiefs and exchanged glances which enquired as to how they had found themselves here in the worst of all possible places.

When it was over he walked towards the car park with his mother, holding her by the elbow. Her walk was calm and dignified. She had not cried during the funeral, which surprised him. He wondered what way she had decided to frame her mourning and realized that she had decided to defer to the death as though it was a doctor or a solicitor or other tactful and convincing professional. As he was unlocking the car Margaret approached them. She kissed his mother, gave her a solicitous look. His mother put her hand on Margaret’s forearm. These were events which did not include him. He felt their approval of each other. He felt the weight of future exchanges. Phone calls. Shopping trips. He remembered how during their marriage Margaret would swap clothes with his mother and how they would engage in small financial transactions with repayments scrupulously adhered to. It represented a tautness in their relationship. No detail was too small. The world was full of unexpected traps and the smallest event had scope for disaster. This was handed on from mother to daughter: to be adequate to the small tasks at hand, to be serious, to make store against loss.

The two women talked in low voices. Come for the weekend. Ring me if you feel. Tones of urgent arrangement before they turned to the man standing at the driver’s door as though he was a task to be shared between them, a shoddy thing to be held and turned against a revealing light.

‘Listen,’ Margaret said to him, ‘give me a ring when you get back.’ Her words included his mother so that Ryan didn’t know whether he was supposed to ring or whether Margaret was speaking in deference to the older woman. Either way it was an opening, a reward held out for endeavour. As Ryan watched her return to her own car he felt the revival of an old lust, strongest when she wore formal dress. The black patent high heels, the long skirt in strict pleats, the tension in her calves under black tights made her look tailored into a sexual geometry, a close-fitting garment of the heart.

Ryan stayed for a few days after the funeral.

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