Gary Finnegan is a journalist and fiction writer living in Kildare. He has degrees in physiology and science communication and has worked as a magazine editor, newspaper columnist and freelance communication advisor. Gary has won the EU Health Prize for Journalists (Ireland) on three occasions and is the winner of two Irish Medical Media Awards. He is the author of Beijing for Beginners: An Irishman in the People’s Republic (Liffey Press) and is working on a collection of short stories.
Still time
‘Best wishes on your retirement – ESB 2018’
By Gary Finnegan
Josie placed the engraved carriage clock on the mantelpiece after the big clear out. The last day of the busiest month the house had seen in years. Two simple coffins, weeks apart, followed briskly by a succession of skips. There was guilt in gaining the power she had longed for, but relief too. Her workload had swelled as the parents aged.
Her mother had never liked the clock, so it passed time collecting dust in the attic until, five years on, the objection died. It had been an early retirement gift from the Electricity Supply Board, presented at perfunctory after-work drinks, attended by people with coats over their arms and eyes on their watches. It marked the early end to an unchosen career, with a redundancy payment that would keep her in good winter coats.
She was tired by then and was the last of the old gang who was still punching in. Retirement, redundancy, death. The end came for everyone, sooner or later. This latest wave of exits brought with it lump sums and pension top-ups. Some took the package and ran with the liberty it bestowed. Cruises, new cars, a place in the sun.
For Josie, it was simply her time to go, though it left her with countless waking hours to fill.
Her whole adult life had been a childless pregnancy, waiting for a freedom never born. And here she was, decades from the grave, still making her bed in the house where she was reared. Josie had never married. She declared herself asexual before it was en vogue. These days, if anyone dared to ask, she might describe her sexuality as somewhere between spinster and Don’t be askin’ me them dirty questions.
For a brief spell, she had entertained the notion of a romantic friendship with Colin Flynn, an ESB fitter whose skills were in low demand. His hours were spent in the canteen, regaling anyone who might listen to his unlikely stories of personal heroism. Josie enjoyed his divided attention. In those quiet, fading years since she collected the clock, it occurred to her that Flynn’s most alluring quality was his marital status – he had been safely taken off the market by a childhood sweetheart when both were barely 19. In truth, Colin was not her type.
***
The night before the first funeral, neighbours arrived with concerned faces and curious minds. Some brought their own teapots. They did what neighbours do at times like this. Tea, triangular sandwiches. The mourning drill.
Few had cause to darken the door of number 26 for years. The estate’s older generation – the ‘originals’ – had their families raised and the deeds purchased from the Council. They took their turn dying, in keeping with the natural order. The house, suddenly swelled with people, invited claustrophobia. Two up, two down, nowhere to hide on a good day. Not from the cruelty of passed remarks.
Is the daughter divorced? someone’s teenage granddaughter wondered, leaning into a huddle of bowed heads. Oh, that one will be returned unopened, a neighbour smirked between bites of Battenberg. They sniggered up their sleeves, their conspiracy overheard.
Josie’s generation, now in their 60s, were only ever seen passing through their childhood homes, visiting parents in various states of frailty. They had families and holidays and a work thing to go to. You know yourself, they’d say mid-stride between car and hall door. Now, here they all were, sorry for her loss, milling around the kitchen fussing over kettles and sliced pans.
Nothing had been done to the place since the lean-to was thrown up in the early ‘70s to expand the parlour. Busy carpets had arrived in 1977 when the house was a livelier place. Now, the textured wallpaper was losing its determination to cling to the wall. Siblings had long ago moved out, human traffic slowed to a trickle, fashions froze in time.
The furnishings were stale, soaked through with sadness. Yet hardly a tear had fallen in the place for 40 years, at least not in company. Even at the funerals, there were only dry eyes.
It wasn’t the loss of her parents that weighed on Josie’s mood, but the low-level mourning of decades passed without incident. Highlights, lowlights, drama. Maybe in other houses.
Instead, one year rolled into the next with ever decreasing fanfare.
***
Josie learned to walk with a whisper to lighten her impact on the world, in contrast to Ellie McNamee. A free-spirited force of spiralling technicolour scarves, Ellie had been brought back to the street late last year by her mother’s worsening emphysema. Josie and Ellie were tight in their teens, but Ellie was London-bound as soon as she came of age. Their bond dissolved after an early flurry of letters, with no contact until Josie’s parents passed.
They had embraced at the first funeral and exchanged soft words. At the second wake, Ellie stayed back to help wash up and stretch cling film across uneaten salads. Wearing floral shawls and the costume jewellery of a younger woman, she oozed libertine possibility.
Josie was alive in Ellie’s presence, if unnerved by her unpredictability. Neither accident nor obligation ran Ellie’s life. In London, she had married an older man when the mood took her – and later left him for a woman when that felt a better fit. Now, single again and back on the north side of the Liffey, she was making a conscious choice to shepherd her mother towards the last of her breaths. In all things, Ellie was deliberate.
‘Well, déjà vu, Josie,’ Ellie said, hanging a tea towel on the oven handle, before fixing the polka dot bow that held back her salt and pepper curls. ‘Have you given any thought to what you might do now?’
‘Throw a shape on the place,’ Josie said. ‘Finally put my own stamp on it. Put my clock over the fire.’
‘God, love, is that the height of your ambition?’
Ellie had licence to press, to probe. Josie shut down when challenged with discomforting questions. But she knew Ellie of old, and suspected this kind of interrogation might unlock the kind of happiness that came so naturally to her childhood friend.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ Josie sighed. ‘I’ve been too busy minding them to think about much else, haven’t I?’
As they divided fractions of cakes between the cupboard, the fridge and the bin, Ellie suggested that Josie think hard about what makes her happy. She said no more years should be given to silence and solitude. She scolded her for referring to herself as a spinster – ‘wash that word from your mouth’ – and insisted Josie entertain a personal renaissance: eat recklessly, drink dangerously, spend wastefully, commit new sins.
‘Ah that’s all fine and well, but I’m 62,’ Josie pushed back. ‘Bit late for dabbling in sin – anyway, the last few years have been hell and I’ve no interest in being barred from Heaven.’
Ellie was unmoved by such a feeble defence. She made a case for joy and fun, for something bordering on hedonism. ‘I’ll tell you what I believe,’ said Ellie, putting a firm hand on Josie’s forearm. ‘Either there’s someone up there – a God, if you like – who made you as you are and would be terrible disappointed if you suppressed yourself. Or there’s nobody paying any mind, in which case we ought to live as we bloody please.’
There was an electric warmth to Ellie’s touch, of the kind that shone from her eyes when she smiled. After a moment’s pause, Josie nodded, and went about righting the chairs which had been set at improper angles by neighbours who had passed through with service station mass cards.
‘Thanks for everything, Ellie, will I see you in the church in the morning?’
‘Not really my cup of tea, love,’ said Ellie. ‘But I will see you. Maybe you’ll have an answer to the question of your own contentment next time. Take care.’ She pressed her cheek against Josie’s as they hugged.
Josie closed the door behind her old friend, hoping she might call within the week, but fearing that it would take the death of Ellie’s mother to reunite them. Funerals have a habit of breathing new life into the living.
***
The place looked better with the walls painted and the bright floorboards exposed and varnished. A wood-wormed wardrobe and its contents had filled the last skip and Josie finally had the furniture as she had imagined it. The trouble was, once this had been achieved, there was little left to wish for. Ellie, like the other neighbours, had not darkened the door since the wake.
The audible ticking of the clock played a mocking soundtrack that traced the speed of time.
Josie felt an anger well up. She was angry with her parents for the lost years. Angry with the workmates who had pursued their own happiness, leaving her alone in a job for life. Angry at the nosy neighbours for their parasitic sympathies and their sneering judgements. Angry at Ellie for filling her head with hope, before fading back into shadow. And angry at herself for not being someone else; for not being Ellie.
And that clock.
That clock was a con, a false promise. It had tricked her into thinking that it might symbolise the liberty of a new age. Wasn’t its release from the attic supposed to parallel an unlocking of Josie herself?
But here she sat, surrounded by sparse furnishings and her swirling thoughts.
She felt the loss of her parents along with the departure of responsibility. There was loneliness in liberty.
Josie, her face reddening and teeth clenched, made for the mantlepiece, taking the carriage clock in both hands. Ready to silence it against the wall. The clock ticked in her grip, marking the death of another hour, as she raised it behind her head.
The doorbell rang. In her surprise, the clock slipped her fingers and hit the marble fireplace, spilling its mechanism at her feet.
She could see the silhouette of Ellie’s hand raised to ring again – Ellie never was renowned for her patience.
The clock’s ticking had stopped. The bell played a double encore.
And Josie knew there was still time.
The Galway Review 