Over Our Heads

Stations

The following year, the twenty-sixth fell on a Sunday. Mangan woke late to the howl of a neighbour’s dog. He breathed through his nose the coolness of the other pillow. His arm beneath his ear was numb; he waited for it.

At length, blood resumed its course and the fingers were his again. He rose and dressed, crept to the bathroom, lathered and razored his jaw. A crisp draught slapped his cheek as he knotted the tie at his throat. The suit was made of blue serge, its pockets wide and deep; he’d bought it only months before but now it sagged in the seat. Downstairs, he ate a slice of toast broken around a fried egg and drank a pot of black coffee at the sink until his hand steadied. Magnets held faded drawings to the fridge’s face behind him. Heaps of papers cried old news from the worktop at his elbow. Around noon, he set out for the Lifeboat, the sky above him loaded. His neighbours’ driveways mostly were empty, their curtains still.

At the far end of the laneway out of the estate, three boys not much older than Rory hunched in a glower of smoke. They were decked in gleaming trainers and drainpipe trousers, on their fingers rings too brightly gold to be made of gold. One of their phones whimpered tinny hip-hop. Mangan kept his eyes on the opposite wall’s graffiti and caught his toe as he passed on the pavement’s broken seam. The boys rocked together, honked together with laughter.

‘There goes the man, now,’ drawled the tallest of the three. Through his dark hair there shot a lightning bolt of bleach, and his sideburns were sharpened to points.

Outside the Lumsdens’ house on the corner a postman dismounted his bike. Ivy licked a wall of the sagging porch. At the front door, a stooped figure dressed in green appeared.

‘Is that young Mangan, there?’ Brendan Lumsden said and squinted down his nose. ‘Tell us now, will you ever be calling around the shop again to see us?’

Often as a child, Mangan had gone with his mother for sweets to the newsagent’s Brendan and his wife ran together on the harbour road. Sunday after Mass had been his mother’s time for presenting herself to the town, for doing messages and for paying visits and for stopping to swap scandal. Brendan now ran the shop alone, but still he referred to himself in the plural.

‘To be honest,’ Mangan said, ‘I’ve been keeping myself to myself.’

‘That’s the good thing sometimes,’ Brendan said. ‘I suppose.’ He sat on the garden wall to knead an ache from his thigh. Beside him the panicles of a butterfly bush reached heavily towards the pavement. The postman handed him an envelope and wheeled away one-legged.

‘It is,’ Mangan said.

‘But sometimes, though, it isn’t, do you know that way?’

More recently, Sunday had been his day about town with Rory. Brendan’s wife played peek-a-boo with the boy from behind the shelf of firelighters, called him ‘the up-and-coming heartbreaker’ and, once, daubed ice cream from his cheek with the collar of her cardigan. Her name was Peggy but Rory called her ‘Veggie’. She and Mangan’s mother had been in the hospice at the same time.

‘Isn’t it a hard old world?’ Brendan said.

‘It can be,’ Mangan said.

He took his leave then, feeling at fault for not having inquired after Liz. But that might have meant talking about Annette, and he was glad that Brendan hadn’t mentioned her. He crossed the street and wound towards town in the cool shade of the ice houses. Compressors hummed behind rusting doors with hinges glossed in rime, above which seagulls rode the gusts from sea to shore. One scaly-toed bird perched on the lip of a plastic crate where a soup of swim bladders ripened. It shuffled its feathers, goggled at Mangan, lowered its beak in stench.

The tremor came again to his hand as he rounded on to Strand Street, but at the Lifeboat he found only darkened windows. The pungency of old stout seeped from cracks in wood and grout. A handwritten sign affixed to the pub’s door announced a family matter. Mangan sucked his teeth and hid the hand in a trouser pocket. He looked across the street towards the rise of St Patrick’s bell tower, roofed in crumbling shingle and pointed with a cross. From the fine grain of the building’s brick, some luminous mineral shone.

After the funeral, he had started going to Mass again. For months, Annette spent her weekends in bed and Rory’s room remained untouched. But then, one Sunday morning, he read in the bulletin that the church was accepting donations. Soon afterwards, Annette saw a boy at the rugby pitch wearing a Lions jersey with a fraying sleeve. Mangan had come home to find her sitting at the kitchen table, the jersey spread beside her with its sleeve newly stitched. Within a week, Rory’s things were boxed, his bed and bookcase sold. A week later, Annette was gone.

Mangan had not been inside the church since, but now he felt the pull of blue stained glass and columned portico. He crossed the street to find the font empty save for a brittle sponge. The nave, where two old women knelt, was dark and stale. Along one wall, the confessionals were curtained in fraying purple velvet, and between them, cast in plaster, were the Stations of the Cross.

Mangan walked the Stations, from judgement to crucifixion, the heels of his shoes creaking on the church’s well-walked boards. He paused at the fourteenth where the Saviour’s body, wrapped in linen, was laid to rest in the tomb as the women of Jerusalem wept. Next to the cast was a handmade banner that read The Resurrection, and below that were a number of children’s drawings in crayon and coloured pencil: Jesus, chest emblazoned with a red S, soared above Metropolis; Jesus, beardless, ate cereal and toast at a kitchen table. Mangan touched the clots of crayon where the lines unsteadily crossed. He dropped a coin into the box by the grotto and lit a candle.

On the church steps, the afternoon broke across his face. Shoppers and gossips and idlers and kids criss-crossed the town’s main thoroughfare. Cars jutted from parking spaces like broken teeth. Skateboarders kick-flipped around a mother dragging a child. Mangan quickened past the SuperValu’s trolley bay and the deli’s flowerless planters. A mossy lane led him to the beach where a salt wind rose to meet him. Tang of ozone filled his throat as he climbed the steps to the dunes. The tide was out and the plain was smattered with rocks and hunks of wrack. The headland curved around a bay whose restful water covered rip tides. The sea below the islands, and the sky above them, were steely. But between them, where the dark cloud lifted, a pale light shone.

Mangan took the half-bottle from his inside jacket pocket. A lifeguard watched him from a deckchair perched at the crest of a dune. He was young and he wore a yellow sweatshirt and he was waving. Mangan waved back. The lifeguard let his hand fall. He rose and stepped lithely as the sand at his flip-flops crumbled.

‘Well?’ Mangan said.

‘This is a public beach.’ The lifeguard’s lips were thin and chapped and his nose was broad and pink.

‘I know where I am.’

‘So, you’ll have to put that away, then, won’t you?’

Mangan raised the mouth of the bottle to his lips. He wanted to drink it off in one but the liquid burned in his throat. He drew a cuff across his chin and bent at the hip and spun. The bottle sailed against the sky and disappeared into a snarl of sedge grass.

‘Satisfied?’ he said.

On the promenade, a woman pushing a stroller stopped to shake her head. Two little girls, straddling bikes that were far too big for them, pointed. Mangan heard on the wind in snatches the sounds of waves and of gulls. His bones felt out of joint, his heart like melted wax.

‘I have real work to do,’ the lifeguard mumbled. ‘Please, just get out of here.’ He turned his back and reascended swiftly to his watcher’s chair. Mangan crept out of the lifeguard’s sight and lay down in the shade of a dune. He dug his fingers into the sand until the skin pushed back at the nails. Then, for a long while, he felt nothing.

The sun dipped.

Between the islands and the shore, fresh whitecaps rose and fell. Oystercatchers waddled in twos and threes and bent to beak at rock pools. The incoming tide ran from ridge to sandy ridge, seaweed giving form to its movement in streelish trails. Mangan felt a breath of wind against his cheek and opened his eyes. No one approached him from across the sand. The cloud lifted further from between the islands and the light shone brighter.