Evenings and Weekends

by Oisín McKenna

Phil is always demanding that mundane activities take on a significance above their station.

I feel so incidental to your life, but you’re so central to mine. It doesn’t feel good. I can’t do it forever.’

He wants more than anything to make Keith’s adult life indescribably good, never not pleasurable, rich and bright, so great that any pain will become a vague and distant memory.

Their wordlessness is a symptom of their intimacy, so attuned to each other that they are beyond verbal language altogether. Barely saying a word, these two are understood. They will go home; they will watch telly; they will go to bed. She will turn over onto her side and he will hold her from behind, the same position they have slept in for nearly forty years.

There is no need to waste time saying ‘I will miss you when you’re gone’ and ‘I don’t want to go to a place where I can’t hold you any more’ because all of this is understood.

For the first time in close to forty years, she sings. For the first time since she stopped going to Mass with her poor dead mam, she sings. She sings as if Cher herself was wailing from deep down inside of her belly. She sings and sings and nobody cares. The men at the bar who were staring into the dregs of their pints before she began are still staring into the dregs of their pints now. The teenagers at the back, dressed all in black and so much like her second son, continue looking at their phones and taking small conspiratorial sips from their vodka Red Bulls. The floor is still sticky; the room still smells of booze; people still stumble in and out and the sound of dual carriageway traffic still revs around the room. The dual carriageway itself remains unchanged too. There are still the cars full of people; there are still the places they could go; there is London, Europe, anywhere.

But for Rosaleen, to sing: it was nothing short of the world.

He thinks of himself as a good communicator. He thinks of himself as having transcended the stereotype of men as being unable to describe their feelings. But around his family he becomes the most repressed of all, like the sad old patriarchs who were brought up to believe that the strength of society relies on their continued silence.

The priest says that love isn’t a feeling. It’s not the butterflies in your tummy you get in the giddy early days of a relationship. The butterflies don’t last, he says. Love is something you deliberately decide to do through repeated actions of care. Love is something you make.