Dec 24, 2024
Nov 16,2024
About Divination, Stephen says: "Time has a way of confounding your expectations. I wanted to write about that uncertainty... and the tension between faith and reason, and the fragility of hope."
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Something odd in her voice on the phone and a hesitant tread downstairs late.
He has just bundled their child out the door to school, pulling the coat up about small shoulders, placing a kiss on his forehead as he zips him up, the six-year-old wiping it away with an exaggerated moue that both amuses and spears, and while he stands there becoming redundant in the narrow hallway, contemplating their child's image fading away behind frosted glass, she tells him the future is bleeding into the present.
Anything he says might be foolish or inadequate and so he concentrates on manoeuvring the old car towards Galway, wiping condensation away from the windscreen with his hand, cold beads of water gathering about fingertips to drip, drip down, submerging feelings or questions before they manifest in futile words.
The car is the only thing he has control over, a froth of discarded events and possibilities in its wake. Behind them somewhere a fairground psychic assures her she will have a large family. The prognostication costs fifty quid and he prays the charlatan dies roaring. He has never charged for his lies.
'Everything will be fine,’ he promises.
He takes a hand off the wheel for a second and places it on top of hers which are curled into the lap of her long new coat. He is wearing his emergency good shirt. She frowns at this description. Sees it as a rebuke of their slow progress towards a time when all shirts are good.
‘Everything will be fine.’
Her hands tend to curve inwards slightly when she is tired and the flesh is cold as if she has just come in from one of her walks with a flavour of weather still on her skin, the days finally beginning to lengthen again but she smiles at him which is something at least.
‘Yes.’
He fiddles with the controls on the plastic dash trying to coax out some extra warmth for her, cresting a steep hill, allowing gravity to pull the car down the shadowed bray towards the lights at the junction, timing gear changes to intercept green in third and efficiently preserve momentum. The thin morning light pales her face and hollows her eyes as she moves through her own branching realities some of which will inevitably diverge from his, but in this place they are together and can only move forward.
He thinks about how far they have come together. How things have become a bit easier over the last few years. Checks his mirrors, remembering perfume and the weight of her arms around his neck at breakfast only a few days before. A whispered, ‘Nearly out of the woods Hansel,’ their son rolling his eyes at this latest display of parental nonsense and he had been foolish enough to allow new possibilities to coalesce after all those years of trying. Began to simulate scenarios in his head. School, careers, grandchildren. An inevitable squabble over godparents. He is drifting and nearly misses the turn for the hospital. He bites down hard on his tongue bringing him back into the now, the normal patterns and rules cached, eager to be called up and take them somewhere stupid like his work where a small sea of bored faces listen to him describe a cartoon universe where electrons spin reliably about nuclei or to that brutalist shopping centre they visit at weekends in a vain effort to save money.
For the future.
Up ahead a magpie is picking earnestly at some small dead thing in the road and she swivels her head, frantically looking for another bird.
‘Try your wrist, pet.’
She sighs and relaxes back down into the seat, thumb tracing the edge of the small backup corvid that he got for her last birthday. It had seemed like a good idea at the time but led to an opportunistic tattoo on the other wrist the following week.
‘You wouldn’t look at my one twice?’ he asks, genuinely curious when she shows him this new addition. She laughs. His rational frugality amuses her; the way his solitary magpie turned out to be a gateway tattoo, but he is more mindful of her faith in such things having once casually dismissed the sound of the ocean from seashells.
‘Ambient noise amplified by the shape of the shell,’ a younger, brasher version declares in a shabby Dublin antique shop as she gently cups the home of some long-devoured mollusc to his ear.
‘Resonance. That’s all.’
And then he notices the look of puzzled disappointment on her face.
‘You didn’t think it was the sea, did you?’
‘I just wish you were a bit more imaginative sometimes,’ she says.
At their destination he eases her from the car and suddenly she is flustered. Panicky. His own heart threatens to come loose on its mounts and careen about his chest. He wonders what today will cost them.
‘My coat. Is my coat all right? Look, would you?’
‘No, no,’ he tells her checking the back of the coat.
‘It’s grand. You’re the finest, so you are.’
Inside at reception they are directed down a long corridor well away from the hubbub of the foyer and the curious regard of others. The seating area is nearly full and yet there is a sepulchral stillness.
Women, some with bags, are arrayed on bolted-down seats and could be waiting for a flight, staring at phones or into space or glassy eyed at a muted flatscreen where bizarrely a hospital soap plays out. Improbably well-constructed people rush silently about and problems of the heart are dissolved with a quick splash of joules. There are other men scattered about. Here to bear witness and provide thin solace, accessories to events before and after the fact. The guilt he feels comes from never wanting it as much as she did. Not really. He had been happy enough with just the one and what was so wrong with being happy enough?
But she does not want their child to be alone. Imagines a gentle future with sisters and brothers, nieces and nephews; the comfort of an extended family after the two of them have gone. They bicker over that too.
He wants a cremation followed by a strewing about the garden. The powdered bone dispersed so he might continue in the plants and small things until the sun swells and his atoms drift on starlight’s breath, while she has her heart set on them mouldering together in some damp Catholic hole beneath a chunk of reasonably priced granite.
In the end, he had relented.
Sure, if it made her happy, what would his atoms care?
A pattern soon begins to emerge. A name is called; a woman gets up and leaves the waiting area, trailing the competent double squeak of the nurse’s synthetic soles down the corridor. Those who return after ten or fifteen minutes begin to text or just sit there quietly changed. They watch juddery, cold bubbles of despair rise within a young woman opposite, grief staunched chin on chest, long hair hiding her face.
They want to comfort her but don’t know how.
No one had warned him this thing was so common. That there were waiting rooms filled with people going through exactly the same thing. He can’t begin to name it yet. Eventually someone comes to take the young woman away.
There is talk of upstairs.
She is at her wrists again. Rubbing. Skin reddening beneath her thumbs.
‘You and your magpies,’ he says. It comes out harsher than he meant.
‘Hush you,’ she says and then nudges him. ‘We’re the oldest ones here.’
Was that it then? They have frittered away time and possibilities trying to have careers and a roof over their heads?
The examination room is smaller than he expected. A low ceiling and inoffensive soft pink walls enclose a desk with the usual bureaucratic accessories and an examination table hinged to form a chair around which a trio of haruspices loom. They look young but capable; blue scrubbed arbiters of small private disasters. An ultrasound crouches in wait behind them with a transducer wand that makes him wince. They help with her clothing and arrange her carefully in the chair beneath the fifty hertz flicker of fluorescent tubes, the future manifesting as a garish splash on a pale thigh all the more shocking and human in the bland colour scheme of the room. He sees her looking down at her wrists and reads the mumbled magpie rhyme on her lips.
‘Two for joy,’ she says to the nurse and the other woman strokes her hair and there is a kindness in the touch that comforts. He feels some recognition pass between them, and in himself frustration that she can be calmed so easily with a simple touch while all he has are clumsy words suitable for scraped-knees on the playground. Ridiculously he feels like a voyeur and turns away to concentrate on the monitor.
How much of this is his fault? A payload of gibberish code in one of his lads?
Too much beer or processed food maybe?
His ignorance is staggering.
The spray of ultrasound returns grainy pixelated echoes of the future or perhaps a probe transmission from Pluto. We might have called you Charon, he thinks seeing a shifting grey landscape with a small dark moon kissing an undulating horizon. Crosshairs are positioned and numbers solidify in the corner of the screen. A full waiting room ensures facts are delivered in succinct monotone without preamble. There is a lack of fluid. A dearth of mass. An absence of noise, and yet he senses a reluctance to make a final pronouncement. They’ll get her to come back in a few days and try again. She should go home and come back if things get worse.
Standing there useless in his emergency shirt he hears himself ask why the image does not resemble any future they had imagined at this stage? They need a divination. What does the quiet moon mean?
The medics exchange a look and the previous reticence sublimates in the warm air, the room becoming thick with words that drift, enveloping them, bleeding away any remaining momentum. He bows his head, no longer listening, watching her instead. Watching desolation bloom. There is no future, just an endless series of nows to be navigated. The medics were just trying to be kind; he can see that now.
Now they must go home and come back when nature takes its course.
In the busy foyer, as he fumbles with change for the car park ticket machine, she reaches out with a soft intake of air and pulls him in close, coins spilling from his hand, scattering across the coffee-spattered terrazzo like startled silver fish.
There, between a café where people queue for mid-morning snacks and a gift shop with a display of get-well-soon cards and congratulatory balloons, they transition unnoticed into another smaller universe and he knows there is a version of him nearby that never drove her to this place. Someone who could hear the sound of the ocean in seashells. A different him who will say goodbye to both their children in the narrow hallway each morning and watch their shapes fade away behind the frosted glass of the front door, slowly becoming redundant, as all parents should.
And in this new place, they will go for a walk one evening with the cackle of magpies in the trees and find a way to move forward again. He will tell her in his stilted, awkward way of his own superstitions. Things that might never be proved. His certainty that possibilities exist to be realised somewhere else. That this is not everything. They are together and there is time and hope and who can say what will come next?
‘Hush you,’ she will say. Counting birds from the corner of her eye.
