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Large White Chrysanthemums

Derek Kelly

    It is afternoon. Between lectures you have signed up to you explore the town. You try letting your mind ramble. The supervisor said it would help. At times it does. Between buildings you see the outline of far-off hills. They appear purplish blue beneath a grey sky. A cluster of trees. Nearby a house, a home, maybe a farm. Cattle lolling. You imagine the green fields about the house, the home, the farm. The children playing. The warmth of a kitchen.
    “Focus on the future.”
    “Dispel the past.”
    That’s what the supervisor tells you. Your friends say much the same.
    “Start afresh.”
    “Put yourself out there.”
    “Find someone new.”
    “Begin again.”
    But it’s difficult. You catch sight of yourself in a shop front window and wish you were someone else. People are concerned for you. You read about a man who, on entering his wife’s solicitor’s office, doused himself in flammable liquid and set himself alight. Another, pleading with his partner to let him see his kids, set himself on fire outside the home they had once shared. The papers reported that incident saying the man immolated himself in front of local children. You wonder if this was the machine kicking into gear because, a comment by an eyewitness on The Journal website said no children were present until after the incident.
    You meet with your daughter once every three weeks. The meetings last an hour and a half. The supervisor accompanies the two of you. As if somehow, you are the one that’s dangerous. You have told the supervisor you did nothing to your wife. You did nothing to deserve this. There was no domestic abuse. Arguments, yes, but you never harmed your wife. She just didn’t want to remain married having fallen out of love with you. With your daughter you walk around the park. Always the same park. Conversation is stilted. The relationship needs repairing. It will take years. That was what the judge ordered. She was not going to jail your wife. She was not going to give you custody. The bond with your child is fractured. Irretrievably, you fear. Your daughter calls you by your first name now. It used to be dad. Distance has set in. You want to tell her none of this was your fault. But you can’t. You want to tell her you pay maintenance for her. But you are forbidden from doing so.
    After every meeting you tell your mother how it went. You are her only carer. She is immobile now. Her end is nearing. The doctors have told you to expect it. Unable to attend church, you read passages from the bible to her every night. They are her only source of comfort. She accepts she will never see her granddaughter again.
    “When we cross the river Jordan things will be different,” she says. You wonder if she truly believes this.
    You kiss her on the forehead without commenting and wish her good night. In the early hours of the morning when you use the toilet you sometimes hear her whimpering like a scared child in the darkness of her bedroom. You do not intrude. Instead, you listen outside awhile before retreating to your own room. The same bedroom you have known since your childhood.
    In the distance you see the local courthouse. You read its architecture was based on a pagan Greek temple. Two nineteenth century canons taken from the Russians at Sebastopol guard the entrance to the building. You search the faces of the crowd standing on the steps outside waiting their turn to enter. You imagine yourself being one of them and, unable to approach any further, you instead turn up a side street where, finding a coffee shop, you buy a latte and, lighting a cigarette, you make your way back to the college for your final lecture imagining the old life. The what ifs and what nots haunt you like a ghost.

    It is evening and the college library is mostly quiet. The rule, if not the air, monastic. Being in no mood to read coursework you take, from the shelf marked Poetry Interwar Period, a book on the life of Thomas Parke D’Invilliers. You listen to your own footsteps as you ascend the wooden steps to the reading area. The creaking caused by your footfall disturbs you. You need to do exercise. Lose the paunch. Looking around there are more students than you expected for this late hour. You search for a desk away from everyone else. Seeing a desk without a PC you decide to walk towards it. Consciously, you pull in your stomach. Straighten your shoulders. Raise your head. The sound of fingers drumming keyboards, a chair groaning, weak coughing, accompanies you to your seat. Sitting in the corner, you let yourself relax. You let the book fall open. Placing your bag on the desk you open it carefully and retrieve from it a pen and a notebook. Setting your mobile to Do Not Disturb you look about the dimly lit space. Light falls through tall Romanesque windows. The library, you were informed, was once a church. The house of God now secularised and deconsecrated, abandoned by God. At your back there are stained glass panels. Diffused light crawls across the paraquet floor. A panel depicting Christ is in the centre. On either side are St Patrick and St Brigid. Christ’s parents are placed at the margins. St Joseph stands alone. Mary is shown holding the infant Jesus. Mother with child. Always, mother with child. Above Christ there is a rose window. The centre panel portrays the sacrificial lamb. The other segments display the archangels. You wonder who designed the windows. The ceiling is made of dark oak panelling. Apart from the stained glass, the interior sparseness reminds you of the church you grew up in. Lighting runs along the side walls. Between each source two plain Romanesque leaded windows. The lights hang like baskets of large white chrysanthemums.
    It is then you notice one light shade distinct from all the others. Your eye is drawn to it. Beneath the light you see a face looking at you from behind dark hair. She is smiling. Caught, you avert your eyes. You stare at your feet. Then at the desk. Your eyes fall on the open page of the book. You read the poem:
    Lost souls unite
    Through ages spent
    In ruin and torment
    And memories lost
    To the cold night
    Lie tranquil come the morn’
    Say then
    What we see and feel
    To be the muffled chant
    That spreads itself
    Through everything
    And is both free and warm
    I awake both parched and hollow
    From nights that seem
    So dark and dim
    And love which seems
    So scantily clad
    Is borne along so many streams
    While reading the poem, you heard a book closing, a zipper fastening, a chair screeching on the paraquet floor and footsteps fading away on the wooden stairs.
    Slowly, lifting your head you trace your eyes towards the irregular shaped shade. The one under which the woman was sitting. You wait. You have always been waiting. And for what? A Deus ex machina? For Carla to take you back? You know the life you had is gone. It cannot be resurrected. No matter how much you hope. Deep inside you, you know the futility. You have read how celebrities remarried the same person. And yet you still hope the same. But Lazarus never smiled after he was brought back from the realm of the dead.
    You put away your notebook and pen, return the book to its rightful place on the shelf. You stride out of the library and through the corridor to the outside and there, pulling on a cigarette in the area delineated for smokers, you see the woman, and approach cautiously.

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