Gone by Martin Roper Page A

moment she shares, that she still wants a child. She was shopping last week, she says, and she saw a beautiful child in a pram and she could understand how women are moved to steal babies. We finish our tea and step out into separate nights.
    She offers me a lift back into town but I decline. She offers again and I say yes, still not wanting to appear hurt. As we drive in along the coast road I look across the strand at Sandymount, at a late-night rider cantering along the sand near the edge of the ebbing tide, and beyond the Strand there is Dollymount beach where my father took Ruth and me with soggy tomato sandwiches when we were children, all of it fading now under the darkening sky, and as the city grows closer I force myself not to look in the direction of Bath Avenue as we head for the North-side. She is making conversation and I try to enter into it but am tired. Words separate us now. Words weave in and out like cordons. It takes forever to say anything that matters. Words are big and clumsy with us; they spill out failures. The things that have shaped our lives. The white trousers she wore that evening. The slope of her breasts beneath the blouse as she talked about Winnicot. I am tired of Dublin, of trying to make sense of my life here, tired of Ruth’s death, and as we cross the Liffey together for the last time it sinks into me that she is right: it is over. I am tired of her. I look at her hand on the steering wheel. If she were a colour she would be beige. I smile to myself at the cold boredom I feel towards her. For the first time in our life together, I let myself feel indignant in her presence and I think of a last parting shot. I think of all the times I did not retaliate in arguments and now I want her to remember the last words I will ever utter to her. I will cut her down just as I am getting out of the car and then close the door before she has a chance to answer. She pulls up outside my father’s house and she turns off the engine. I look at her. Maybe she too has a parting shot. But it is not in me to do it. I can almost hear Ruth whisper: Not worth it. No bitterness. Go the other road.
    I will go back to New York. I will find something there. Something will happen. I haven’t let go of Ursula but I will. One day I will show her the indifference she feels for me now.
    *   *   *
    I cannot even remember the sound of my sister’s voice. It is gone. Her voice has become a huge silence. I loved her laughter but I can only remember that her laugh provoked laughter in me. Her sweet contagious music is gone. There is only the photograph of her gesticulating with the fork and the roaring silence of the page in front of me. The rest is words hobbling after indistinct memories. The true nightmare of death is forgetting. I forget Ruth, she who I believe I loved more than anyone. Knowing that I have forgotten much of what Ruth was, knowing I too will be forgotten. This is the face of survival. It does away with the fallacy of a pure, everlasting love between human beings. But there was the evening in the kitchen in the flat in Dun Laoghaire. I was sitting trying to meditate and wanting Ruth with me, wanting her back. The sound of the fridge in the corner was distracting me and I had almost decided to give up. Relaxed, open concentration alluded me. I got up, unplugged the fridge, and the room fell into silence. I looked out the window at two crows fighting with each other at the end of the garden. The sound of their squawking audible, even behind the glass. My mind cleared and there was nothing—that splendid moment that is akin to the hiatus that stretches between orgasm and sleep. Orgasm, that release from the self, and meditation the enclosure of the self. Ruth was there, before me. Her essence. A calmness as if nothing else existed. The same sensation of watching a film where an actor leaves the room and the camera doesn’t follow and yet the essence lingers in the full