Free Eden Burning by Deirdre Quiery Page B

amazed at the progress his mother was making. As he looked up, he could see that she had reached the top of the mountain. He wanted to shout at her to be careful, not to go so fast and to remember that she had a weak heart. He didn’t shout. Instead he watched her sitting peacefully at the summit on smooth red rocks. Her hands were again on her lap. She stared straight ahead, into the distance, towards the horizon. She didn’t look at Tom at all. Her expression was serene, joyful with a mysterious ineffable quality – a look beyond emotion. Tom kept watching his mother. It seemed as though she was telling him something that he couldn’t really understand. It had something to do with her serenity – something to do with going beyond emotions. There was something important about the fact that she wasn’t looking at him but was looking straight ahead. She could have turned and smiled at him. Why didn’t she? She knew he was there right below her, looking up.
    • • •
    Elfie remarried within two months of Tom’s mother’s death and moved into a terraced house in Ardoyne. With his new wife, the woman in Dickie’s photograph, he started a second family.
    It was only then that Elfie confided to Tom that he used to hide from his own father when he came home from work. His father would search the house, looking for him. Elfie hid in theglory hole under the stairs. He listened as his father drew closer. He heard him turn the knob on the glory hole door. He saw a hairy arm reach down towards him in the darkness and seconds later, Elfie’s father dragged him screaming into the sitting room. Elfie curled up on the floor, pulling his arms in around his head, withdrawing into himself like a snail into its shell. Elfie’s father removed his leather belt with its metal buckle and thrashed Elfie making sure the metal buckle cracked repeatedly onto his spine until he was too tired to hit him anymore. Elfie’s mother sat in the rocking chair crocheting a table cloth with white linen thread. Tom wondered if it was then that his father’s heart had turned to stone. He prayed that his father would be given a new heart of flesh like the one promised in Ezekiel. He wanted his father to receive a heart that knew how to suffer, a heart that could throb with a conscience and learn how to love.
    Years later, on a cold wintery February in 1939, Elfie lifted a pint of Guinness in the Crown Bar in Belfast. He held the glass perfectly vertical before taking the first sip, the creamy top sticking to his upper lip. “What will you be having?” he called to Danny, Eddie and Sam. The frothy cream settled slowly at the bottom of the glass as he struggled to his feet, squeezed out of the cubicle, to walk with heavy slow feet to the bar. He placed four pints of Guinness on a wooden tray, walked back towards the cubicle, placed the tray precariously on the edge of the rectangular oak table. Then he held his hands in the air as if he had remembered something important to say, or wanted to ask permission to speak. He coughed gently, patting the air, as if acknowledging an invisible wall. A hush fell over the bar. The silence spread to the enclosed cubicles, bounced off the opaque etched glass windows, the dusty arched mirrors, the fleur-de-lis, the marble pillars. Elfie smiled and with a small nod of his head to the right and left, acknowledging the silence or surrendering,he took another step forward, towards the table, where the tray, now holding one pint of Guinness, was stable. His lips moved but no words could be heard. His arms and shoulders circled while his legs remained steady on the tiled floor. The circle widened. His lips moved again, this time two words were heard by everyone.
    “Thank you.”
    He dropped backwards, falling in a perfect 90 degrees arc to the floor, his head crashing onto the polished black and white mosaic tiling, breaking open like a dropped Easter egg. A thin snail trail of blood oozed from his nose, the sunlight