Free Eden Burning by Deirdre Quiery Page A

long fingers that wanted to play the piano but never did or would. He squeezed her hand tight, wanting to see her fingers flutter like a butterfly and settle once more onto the sheets.
    When Tom left his mother, the world had changed. Everyone he now looked at, it seemed as though he was seeing through them – seeing into them. Their bodies were moving but the people themselves didn’t know what moved them or even that they were being moved. Tom knew. Tom didn’t see the world through his eyes anymore. It seemed as though he was looking at the world from no fixed point at all, although if he was asked, he would have tried to say that it now seemed as though he was seeing from his heart – not a fixed point in his physical heart but from his heart which was now everywhere. Tom had the sense that he was a part of everything that existed and that like an air plant, he was taking all the nourishment he needed from the air. Everything that he needed was in his breathing. When he breathed in, he breathed in the whole Universe and when he breathed out he breathed out the Universe. He didn’t really know whether he was breathing in and out the Universe or whether it was breathing in and out Tom. It didn’t matter which way it was. He was intimately connected with everything around him.
    Sitting on the number 57 bus rolling along the Crumlin Road, it now seemed to Tom as though everyone was made up from part of someone else – Ena Martin had his mother’s lips, Roísin McKeever his mother’s hair, and Angela McFadden his mother’s feet. It went on like that until he felt that his mother hadn’t diedbut had only been redistributed around Belfast in the smiles, the laughter, the joy, the sorrow, the sadness of everyone he met. God the artist had painted everyone from the same palate of paint. Colours were dotted onto bodies like canvases. When he found himself filled with a sense of peace, he didn’t know whether he was at peace himself or whether it was his mother who was at peace within him.
    He could feel her breathing inside of him. She was there in his nose, in the sensation of air moving along his nostrils into the back of his throat as he breathed in. She was there in the warm air he breathed out through his mouth. She was there in the beating of his heart, in the touch of his chisel against the cherry wood. He no longer felt that he was one person. Neither did he feel that he was two people but rather that he was one and two people at the same time.
    When Tom went to daily Mass and received Communion he used to feel that the host dissolving on his tongue symbolised everything on earth that he needed to survive. To make the bread, someone needed to sow the wheat, it needed sun and water, it needed someone to harvest, someone to grind the wheat, someone to mix the wheat with water and to add salt. It needed another fire like the sun in miniature to cook the bread. It needed someone to cut the bread, a van to transport it, a priest to be present as mediator between God and man. When the bread dissolved on his tongue he felt he was receiving the whole Universe that had created it for him.
    In those days after his mother died, Tom felt when he went to Mass that his body was the host on the tongue of God. That God was receiving him and giving thanks for Tom’s being – that he was dissolving, dying on the tongue of God. His death and his mother’s life and death were this – small appearings and disappearings on the tongue of God who received them intohimself. It was God who was transformed by eating them. These thoughts and feelings didn’t last very long at all – maybe at most for three days, until he had a dream.
    In the dream Tom saw his mother eagerly scrambling over smooth red rocks, jumping like a goat from rock to rock, and climbing the mountain at great speed and with great dexterity. He slowly followed behind, looking for foot holds, grasping at the rocks with his hands to pull himself forward. He was