My Buried Life by Doreen Finn Read Free Book Online

lingering phase of my return. Time to get proactive, make decisions. My ticket is open-ended, so I have options, but inertia keeps its nails digging into me, dragging me down.
    A girl I know, a research fellow, wants somewhere to stay for a few months, maybe longer. I can sublet my place to her and cover my rent. I reply to her email before I have time to ponder. My place is hers, all 500 square feet of it, caught between the warring Puerto Ricans on one side and the Dominicans on the other. From my fifth-floor window I can lean out and see the Latter Day Saints’ meeting house on the corner of First Avenue and Second Street, the second-hand bookstore next door, the bodega run by a Cuban widow and her disabled son. Graffiti tags sprayed on the dingy redbrick by kids from the projects on Avenue D do nothing to lessen the appeal for me. A Latino man with a squeegee and a bucket balanced on a length of wood across his shoulders cleans the walls, the doors, day after day. I don’t know who employs him. Hardly the city. But he is there, every day, dutifully erasing the giant penises and cartoon breasts left there most nights by the disaffected kids with time on their hands and no better way to expend their anger. There is nothing in Dublin that could even vaguely rival the multihued vibrancy of the East Village. I console myself with the reminder of how much quieter it is. I don’t wake at night to metal bins being thrown around as homeless men fight over someone else’s discarded food, don’t worry about being caught on the subway in the wrong neighbourhood at the wrong time. The consolation is meagre, but in this moment it distracts me.
    Early evening settles its folds lightly around me. Maude is at her bridge game, and I’m alone in the garden. September is almost gone, yet summer is taking its time in leaving, procrastinating in warm, still days and orange sunsets. The house glows red in the dissipating light. I neck a bottle of beer.
    I’m drinking way too much. I know there’s a meeting I could go to, but I lack the conviction. I’ve been through it all many times, the meetings, the sponsors, but I always return to the welcoming embrace of booze.
    I was 16 when I first got drunk. I’d heard my mother go to bed, and the house was quiet except for the noises in my head. My brother had been dead two weeks and I hadn’t slept properly since. I couldn’t bring myself to speak his name to my mother. I couldn’t stop his name being shouted out loud in my imagination, and I slid out of bed and crept down the stairs, thinking I might leave the house, wander away forever into the ebony night. Disappear, just like my brother had done.
    I remember it was dark, and how strange it felt, being up while my mother slept. The front room had some light from outside, and the drinks tray with its modest contents sat on the small table in the corner, where it still sits. Same tray, almost the same selection of bottles.
    The sherry looked cloudy and reminded me of my mother sipping tightly from a tiny glass on Sundays and at Christmas, one inch in the bottom of the glass lasting her the whole evening, afraid of being loosened by one drop more. I chose the brandy and drank it straight from the bottle. It burned the back of my throat, forced tears into my eyes, and I almost choked on its strength. I coughed into a cushion so my mother, upstairs in bed, wouldn’t hear me, then drank again. Despite its fire the brandy tasted familiar, like something I’d been waiting my whole life to try. When it hit my bloodstream it slowed me, quieted my brother’s name to a whisper, steadied me. I sipped till the fire in my throat was unbearable, forcing me to put the bottle down. Something drove me, something I couldn’t comprehend, and still don’t. My mother had a brother who drank himself to death before I was born. Maybe I’m like him. Maybe there is flux between generations, rogue genes hijacked on the DNA highway and carried on.