‘Remnants’ by Ben Behzadafshar
There’s the wall, peering out of a tall grass bank. It shuffles lumpily along until it meets the shadow of a large hawthorn at the edge of Dawson’s field, where it turns towards the main road, dropping stones as it goes as if unsure about finding its way back. The church stands, the rightness of its angles in fond contrast to its ramshackle perimeter, keeping watch over the slumbering grounded. The wall takes its function less seriously; walls are older than churches, and already know that the dead do not need protection. A little sunlight greases the air. Clive comes through the graves to sit on the wall, and the hours blow through the grass at his feet until the dark and the cold come and recede evenly.
I like to think of Clive alone in the churchyard, save for the hawthorn peering at him over the wall. Ireland has the old powers: dithering, enfeebled, but still to be feared. Held in pride and shame, just like regular old people, just like everything Irish. God’s not in the ground anymore; if he was, we wouldn’t build churches. So they keep the hawthorn outside the boundary, but they keep it, and fear it for understanding us even less than we understand it. We, in the world but not of it.
Clive Rea. Clive the Eremite. Patron Saint of Resolute Motherfuckers.
*
Motherfucker was never a word in Ireland. When I was twenty I moved to Manchester and heard someone say it for the first time not on TV. It takes confidence to say. For a few months I dropped it out of my mouth like a cotton ball, but eventually got to know its nuances and we became amicable. How you doing motherfucker? That’s a motherfucker of a day. Those four syllables are like the four arms of a hug, slapping and wrapping. I was happy to have them. I’d wanted to be an architect by profession and a painter by passion. I wanted to self-actualize. Instead I was a waiter, a vomiter, a noodler, a fearful ejaculator, a self-impersonator. Almost as soon as I had left, Clive was sitting on the wall and within a year blogs began calling him the last Irish saint. The story was picked up by some clickbait websites and the pilgrimages began. The church built a hut around him, the wall acting as a sort of room divide. On the side of Dawson’s field, there was a plywood floor and a small bed. On the church side was a window, a door, and his wife’s grave. My dad phoned me every day.
‘They are going to have to remove him.’
‘They come out of that ward worse than they go in.’
‘Never seen the like.’
Dad told me there was considerable consternation when he first went to the wall; talk of social services, police, and so on. I know those meetings. In the church hall, a small huddle of bowed heads, thin lips sipping weak coffee and strong tea made by Donaldson, the minister. Into the dusty air murmurs of assent rise and hang like feathers over the honest bodies below. When the last amen is offered, we look up at each other, and as our eyes adjust back to the temporal from the infinite unseen, the situation feels softer, willing to be addressed. I missed it. Nothing was solvable in Manchester. I had lost nearly all my guilt.
According to my father, some form of internment was a foregone conclusion for Clive. Mrs Allway kept using the phrase duty of care. Donaldson remained quiet throughout the meeting, until the very end. He cleared his throat and said: ‘Surely a man has the right to await the resurrection in a churchyard of all places.’ My father was moved by that. I, hearing it second hand, was not. Donaldson knew it was his fault. All those years of talking in god’s voice without considering the consequences had caught up with him. How many funerals, how many promises of resurrection. After forty years, someone had finally taken him at his word, and now he had to deal with it. Clive stayed on the wall. We all have our itches.
*
I am on the train and have missed the Oxford Road stop because I am crying. A young man sits beside me and reaches over to my face. His palm on my cheek, his thumb under my eye, his index finger under my earlobe, the other three on my neck. He turns my face to him and kisses me long on the mouth. He is gentle, one soft still kiss. The train keeps going. We retract with a small squeak. His thumb licks my lower lip. My body feels soft, buzzy. ‘Something new?’ he says, and I nod. He sits beside me and holds my hand and when he gets off the train he leaves his coffee cup behind. His name is on it in marker, it is Lar.
*
Clive’s wife has not yet been resurrected when he dies. A stone falls from the wall and smashes his head in while he sleeps. Pilgrims have been taking fragments from the wall as mementos made sacred by this old man’s ass, and it kills him. My father phones me in disarray. He has invested his savings, which are meagre, converting our garage into a small living space for pilgrims to stay in. If things continue like this, he told me the week before, I’ll move into the wee space and more of them can stay in the house. All over town panic ensues. Everyone with some space has put a bed and a framed picture of Clive’s hut in it. The number of cafés has increased fivefold, to five. One of Clive’s nieces, Claire, or Catherine, has turned his bungalow into a museum, where she tells stories of how he would heal their bloodied knees as children, and sells the tap water in little jars. I am on the train when dad phones. I am neither crying nor kissing, nor have I been, and I am running out of money. I have stopped going to classes, I have stopped going to work. I ride the train and eat in the stations and nothing happens. I say: ‘Dad, can I come home please.’ I bring two things with me from Manchester, the word motherfucker and Lar’s paper cup.
I come back. The village is wilting, having expended all its energy on one big bloom. I meet my friend Paul in the Fireside. We order IPAs and sit in the new beer garden, empty.
The first thing Paul says to me is: ‘How you doing motherfucker?’
I go to the churchyard, arriving early in the morning. As I walk over to the door of the hut Donaldson staggers out, the right side of his body and face covered in dirt. He sees me.
‘Are you all right,’ I say.
‘How long did you last?’ he says.
‘Fifteen months.’
‘Are you different?’
‘Do I seem different?’
‘Not to me. I was distracted. This place is a mess.’
He’s right. The churchyard is a wilderness, overgrown, strewn with sandwich packets and bottles. Tithing must be in decline. This is what I’ve come back to, something unbuilt.
‘What am I doing here,’ I say.
Donaldson pulls a slug from his coat sleeve. ‘It’s worth feeling guilty to have someone tell you you’re doing okay,’ he says.
I come back to the church the next day. One thing about small villages is that it’s easy to borrow the things that you need. I make an arrangement with a friend of my dad’s; he gives me his petrol lawnmower, strimmer. Dad has a wheelbarrow and a trailer. I get started. The process is lengthy. And I keep coming back, weekly at first, then fortnightly as the churchyard heals from its neglect. The town begins to heal also and I get some more work cutting lawns. I have avoided the disgrace of my return; last year no one could raise their eyes, even to those of a prodigal. While they were looking down I have established myself as the keeper of their remnants.
I strim the perimeter first, along the wall, the bank. Clive’s hut is gone now, its removal arranged by the church elders to stop Donaldson from living in it. Steven Allway has taken over teaching duties. Holding the back end of the strimmer low means you get a flat circle when the wire spins, so you don’t dig into the grass. You twist from the hips or walk sideways like a crab to keep it even. It’s hard on the shoulders and hands and there are risks; when you strim something other than grass it invariably goes into your face. In ascending order, the three main hazards are snails, stones, dog dirt. After the perimeter I go round each grave. This takes a long time. Some graves are just the headstone, some have a little metal railing around them, some are stone structures, and various elaborations. Here’s what I have learned; the fancier a grave the more it goes to shit. A grave lasts a long time; willingness to care for a grave lasts one generation, at most. Do not put a metal railing around a grave. I have to climb into it and strim it all. I can’t get the mower in and the grass just lies there. Don’t put loose stones over the grave. Weeds and grass start to grow through them and there’s nothing I can do. I was tentative at first and would reach over to strim on top of the graves, but the first day I watched two fluffy mutts run around, squatting indiscriminately over the departed and that rid me of my timidity. If you feel someone walking over your grave it is probably me.
I come to know the families of the village better through their dead than I did through their living:
Margaret Gillen, 1956–2011
The word Beloved on your gravestone is not a lie. Your family visit you often. Your daughter is kind to me when I visit the bakery. She knows I enjoy pineapple creams and gifts me one when I buy bread.
Andrew O’Connell, 1977–2015
Your wife remains dedicated to you, as does Mrs Mitchell, who pulls a single flower from a bouquet to place on her own husband’s grave and weeps as she drops the remainder on yours. I have seen them holding hands in church.
Patrick Head, 1905–1999
Dead mice appear on your headstone. I do not know what this means. You have no family in town that I know of. I remove them, but it frightens me.
Susan Coleman, 1960–2004
Your husband is still alive. Everyone is amazed by this. On your various anniversaries he begins a binge from your gravestone and leaves a small bottle of Jameson behind for you. I know he doesn’t begrudge me taking it. I keep your plot nice.
Hope Boyd, 2019
Above you there is a little poem in a cross, a small statue of a robin, and flowers, always fresh. I take them all off before I strim, and put them back as they were. No one told me about the Boyds.
Jeanie Rea, 1930–2017, and her husband, ‘Saint’ Clive Rea, 1936–2018
In the early days, I spread out the flowers so they are distributed evenly between Clive and Jeanie. Now there are no flowers, just grass, that I cut.
My job undoes itself. I see this as a kindness. There can be no thinking ahead when time reverses your exertions.
Some mornings, I see a fox as I drive to my first job. Some days, the strimmer starts with the first pull of the cord. You have to take these things.
From issue #13: spring/summer 2022
About the Author
Ben Behzadafshar is a writer from Belfast, Northern Ireland. His writing examines the themes of ethnic identity, transition, belief and nature, understood through many, many mistakes. He lives with his wife and their dachshund.
