After the Wake by Brendan Behan Read Free Book Online

still, got lost in the complications of what might have happened had he died instead of her, and only brought herself up at the tableau – I marrying her and he blessing the union from on high.
    At about midnight, they began drifting away to their different rooms and houses and by three o’clock there was only his mother left with us, steadily drinking.
    At last she got up a little shakily on her feet and, proceeding to knock her people, said that they’d left bloody early for blood relatives, but seeing as they’d given her bloody little in life it was the three of us were best entitled to sit waking – she included me and all.
    When his mother went, he told me he felt very sore and very drunk and very much in need of sleep.He felt hardly able to undress himself.
    I had to almost carry him to the big double bed in the inner room.
    I first loosened his collar to relieve the flush on his smooth cheeks, took off his shoes and socks and pants and shirt, from the supply muscled thighs, the stomach flat as an altar boy’s, and noted the golden smoothness of the blond hair on every part of his firm white flesh.
    I went to the front room and sat by the fire till he called me.
    ‘You must be nearly gone yourself,’ he said, ‘you might as well come in and get a bit of rest.’
    I sat on the bed, undressing myself by the faint flickering of the candles from the front room.
    I fancied her face looking up from the open coffin on the Americans who, having imported wakes from us, invented morticians themselves.

A Woman of No Standing
    ‘And the priest turns round to me’ says Ria, ‘and says he: “But you don’t mean to say that this person still goes down to see him?”’
    ‘“I do, Father.”’
    ‘“And brings him cigarettes?”’
    ‘“Not now, Father, not cigarettes, he’s gone past smoking and well past it, but a drop of chicken soup, though he can’t manage that either, these last few days.”’
    ‘“Well, chicken soup or cigarettes,” says the priest, “what really matters is that this person continues to visit him – continues to trouble his conscience – continues as a walking occasion of sin to stand between him and heaven. These Pigeon House people must be, shall be, told straight away. They’ll be informed that you, and you only, are his lawfully wedded wife, and that she is only – what she is. Anyway, this way or that, into that sanatorium she goes no more.”’
    ‘You know‚’ puts in Máire, when Ria had finished, ‘it’s a known thing and a very well-known thing, that a person cannot die while there’s something not settled in his conscience. That one going to see him so, outside of the insult to Mammy here, his lawful wife, not to mind me, his only daughter, for all we’reaway from him since I was five – on the top of all that she was doing his soul the height of injury, not to mind holding his body in a ferment of pain, below on this earth, down in that Pigeon House.’
    ‘But no matter,’ says Ria, ‘the. priest wasn’t long about seeing the Reverend Mother and leaving strict instructions that she wasn’t to be let in any more – that she was no more his lawful wedded wife than the holy nun herself.’
    ‘So now,’ said Máire, ‘if you don’t go down early tomorrow you’ll not see him at all, because I doubt if his struggling spirit will back away from Judgement any more, now that all is settled, and his mind at ease.’
    He was still alive when I got down to the Pigeon House but she wasn’t far out, because he didn’t last out the night.
    His face all caved in, and his hair that was once so brown and curly was matted in sweat, and God knows what colour.
    Ah, you’d pity him all right, for the ruined remains of what was once the gassest* little ex-Dublin Fusilier in the street – off with the belt and who began it – Up the Toughs, Throttle the Turks, and Hell blast Gallipoli.
    Ria, his wife, was the kindest woman in Ireland, and (I’ve heard my mother say)