On the eve of his funeral, a sister remembers with love a very special brother gone now, writes YVONNE NOLAN
IT ALL begins with words. Words that teem and toss about, they stream and eddy. They’re torrential and pressing and insistent. They are lovely to hear inside, they talk to you; they are a delight to hear coming in, hovering, banking, waiting to land – that tree, sitka but call it evergreen, the flowers “sweet william” but who is he to be so sweet as to be like raspberry curdling and bleeding into cream? Our place, Corcloon, not a village or a town, but our fields and our neighbour’s fields, watched over from miles by the chimneys of a power station, sentinels. The sounds: the ominous scrape and clang of the cemetery gate, the calves bawling for a bucket, the wheedling miaow of the insincere and part-time house cat, the crunch of wheels on gravel, the throaty rasp of Tom Coyne’s Volkswagen as he changes gears, the red American kettle that sings on the range, the hum of voltage through an electric clock, the thunk of the handpump taking water from the well; a deep, dark place – you can’t see the bottom.
Your mother and father have words, too many words some say, where do you get all those fancy words, they say. Why say incinerate for burn? Why say gravity for serious or the earth’s pull? Why say boooosum for bosom? To make it extra saucy; the fun of malapropism and mispronunciation – a bollocks is also a ball of wax, no one’ll know what you mean, you have to have the lingo – it’s a necessity.
The aunties and uncles have words, they have cold air on them coming in the door. They have brown paper bags. Inside, Oxford Lunch, Lucky Numbers, Salad Cream, Swiss Roll, Emerald Toffees. One auntie alights from a bus; she has a bag called a Travel-light, but it’s not, it’s heavy. JJ has scapulars and miraculous medals. Whelan’s dunky, donkey, ass, asal brays lonely as the night comes in, the kitchen light yellow, and aunties and uncles have cup after cup of tea. The stories then, red lemonade goes flat with the listening. Tomato sandwiches bleed pinkly and run to slime. From the bedroom you can still hear the voices of the adults talking and laughing in the kitchen. Kit and me, a bed on either side of a small room, the last light of a summer’s evening through the curtains that are turquoise with red flowers. Waiting for sleep, listening to words.
Who are our people? We came from people who love words. The Burkes came from a line of doctors. Each Burke baby knew how to be a doctor from the first, they had a way with the suture and syringe. The Flynns knew butchering, sinews and gristle, hanging a hare or bleeding a pig. The Traceys knew wood, dovetailing, morticing, where to drive a nail that it wouldn’t split the timber. Grandad knew words, he found them more entrancing than the daggin’-arsed haunches of a Hereford bullock. He was an indifferent farmer, that’s why granny had to cycle the eight miles to Fore to teach, that’s why Katy Kane came in to boil the dinner; and he above in the bedroom writing a story. The irrepressible tyranny of the words.
Our people know the mystery and magic of words. It is not recessive, it is a renegade dominant gene. What you say to me, what I say to you, what we both think together. Oh the play and love of it! In the car talking. What kind of cow is that? A simmental. A sentimental cow! She gives milk because she empathises. She cries when she sees a beautiful sunset. She moons over Reilly’s bull.
Christy had words. He came into the world with words – resuscitate, revive, critical, damage; a limp blue baby. Later, he’s a small boy, bright-eyed, watching, a listening tilt to his head, channelling the torrent of words. The words come, they worm into his head, he soaks them in, brain like blotting paper. Verbally, he cannot form them; he is not silent but he cannot marshall speech. His eyes, so eloquent, can tell it all, windows to the soul – they move, they gesture, they assent, they disagree, they point, they indicate, they’re displeased, they’re sad, they’re bored, they’re happy, they’re scornful, they’re joking. It’s acting for camera; up close, eyes can talk as well as any mouth. But like some infernal punishment from the dankest cellar of hell his body fights his brain with every ounce of its strength. How to live with a body that makes you seem possessed by a medieval demon, a gargoyle? Spasms, automatic muscle contractions, contort your face, your arms, your legs. The cold-eyed look on cynically as you grunt and drool, your hands grab and flail without your say-so. You’re a freak show. Your body a cruel parody – you’re Quasimodo, the Elephant Man, the fool with the secret. Your body is a bitter betrayal, how can you go on, how can you salvage your sanity? Then the words come like balm, like blessings, arrayed like angels, they anoint, they’re chrism, they whisper and comfort, they’re salvation.
Salvation was writing, finding the means to write kept Christy on this planet for 43 years; he’d have left earlier without the words. And just as he came into the world with words like resuscitate and critical and damage, these too were the words that heralded his departure. We three, my parents and I, sat by his hospital bed, the ventilator gone, he breathing on, his mutinous body now stilled. Our rational understanding of brain death betrayed by irrational fronds of hope; then we saw the shadow pass, we saw the words leaving.
I think about war films, about going over the top, about feats of heroism, the all or nothings, the courage to risk all for an idiotic and impossible dream. I think of those sweaty-faced heroes and how manhood is defined in their image. Then I think of Christy broken, twisted, damaged, strapped in a wheelchair; unable to lift a cup or swat a fly but with three books written, letter by slow letter. All this in face of the unbelievers and the ignoramuses, all the hardship and sweat and tears, the setbacks, the physical pain and suffering, and I think that I have known the bravest, toughest, fiercest man that ever lived.
It’s 4am in the morning on the second day after Christy’s death. The wheelchair stands empty in the hall. We cough out sighs, we moan, our conversation is punctuated with great heaving groans. My mother and father and I, we sit and cry, helpless. There is only one word for this: bereft.
Christopher Nolan’s funeral will take place tomorrow at 10am in St Fintan’s Church in Sutton, Co Dublin