No Way to Say Goodbye - Anna McPartlin [21]
She could hear him screaming, hailing her return in the corridor, and it wasn’t long before a team of doctors, accompanied by her tearful father, revealed how long she had been lost, that Robert had perished, she had missed her Leaving Cert exams, and she was just shy of six months pregnant, soon to be a mother. Lying there surrounded by strange, harried faces, looking down at her swollen self, with her boyfriend dead, her limbs uncooperative, and slurred speech braying in her addled brain… lying there disoriented yet painfully aware that the girl who had got into her boyfriend’s car would never emerge… Through the haze of this new reality, her mind settled on Van Morrison’s familiar beat. He spoke of water and prayed it wouldn’t rain all day.
In contrast to his new neighbour, Sam’s entrance to this world was joyful. He was born to a tired but grateful mother and a proud cigar-toting father, his older brother, then a toddler, inquisitive and keen to stroke his tiny face. His early memories were of train sets, a mother’s perfume, a father’s laughter, a brother’s teasing, but it was his granny who took up most of his head space, she being the one who had raised both boys while their mother worked in her husband’s Manhattan restaurant. Sam’s days were spent accompanying her to the local grocery stores where she’d barter with old friends while catching up on gossip, making the men laugh with her flirtatious wit and the women smile at her kindness. Granny Baskin had moved in with her daughter and son-in-law a year before the birth of her favourite grandchild and just after her own husband had quietly died while sitting on a steel girder thirteen hundred feet from the ground. Granny had often talked of Sam’s grandfather and the day the sky had taken him from her. She wasn’t bitter: he had been in his late sixties, which some considered young, but to Granny Baskin it was long enough for a man such as her husband to be grounded. “He was never meant for this earth,” she’d say. “His head and heart were always skyward.” Then she’d look up towards the heavens and wink as though he was watching.
Most afternoons she’d collect Sam and his brother Jonah from school and take them to the park so that she could catch up with her old friends playing chess and telling stories, while the birds fed on the scraps they sprinkled about themselves. Jonah would run off with other boys and play football or basketball with any ball they could find, and if they didn’t find one he would run as though he was chasing something invisible. Granny Baskin would laugh and wink at Sam, who preferred to sit by her side and listen to a group of old immigrants reminisce about their homelands, comparing stories of the plight of the old world, each one bettering the last’s tale of woe.
Sam had thought it odd that they could tell such sad stories yet laugh and joke so easily, until Granny had counselled that time was a great healer. He was six so he didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, but when she said it she gave him the smile that came with twinkling eyes and pushed a sweet into his hand so he’d remember it. Mr Grabowski and Mr DiRisio would often fight for the old woman’s attention and even a six-year-old could work out that his granny was as sassy as she was old, as wrinkled Mrs Gillespie always said.
It was his grandmother who encouraged his love of Irish music, sharing with him her taste for the Clancy Brothers, the Chieftains and the Dubliners. Luke Kelly made her cry, but her tears were always accompanied by a smile. She introduced him to all kinds of music – jazz, blues, bluegrass, rock, pop, and the only artist they ever disagreed about: Neil Diamond. She bought him his first guitar, telling him that once he’d learned to play he would never be lonely. She saw it in him first, the singularity that would polarize him for his peers. Normal kids didn’t hang out so willingly with their grandmothers. He was an old soul content to remain friendless. His parents weren’t worried that he wasn