Gone Read Online Free

there. Uncle Aidan, a man uncomfortable with touching, embraces me.
    I spend as much time as possible alone, but it is difficult to put Daddy out of my mind. I am full of resentment towards him—I tried for a long time to show him that this day would come and he needed to talk to Ruth before she died. Week after week we had sat on either side of her bed talking to each other, and she watched us as if watching a game of Ping-Pong. How well intentioned but impossibly stupid I was to foist my understanding on him. It was like this with everyone who came to visit her. The tentative How are you? was never really a question at all. Ruth said hospital is an unbarred prison. You enter, they take away your clothes, force a routine on you, force muck they call food down you, make you share your days and nights with strangers, and the visitors, the visitors are the worst of all; slinking in, fear mingled with guilt, and out with embarrassment, relief trailing behind them.
    *   *   *
    The scattering of the ashes. I telephone him to arrange it. That’s taken care of, he says. It is not even a week since her death. Paddy Howard took me out to Howth and we did it there, he says. I am glad he has done it that way. I need to hate him. Now I can leave Ireland finally, without guilt. It’s as if Ruth has died twice and I have been excluded from this more private funeral by my own flesh. I hate him. I hate him because I am closer to Ruth than anyone, no one could love her as much as I do. I didn’t think she could be loved more, even by the man who had helped bring her into the world. The vision of Daddy climbing a hill with his favourite customer to scatter his daughter’s ashes sundered the idea of who I was in the family. He had lost his only daughter. He, who had brought her into the world, and raised her, he alone would watch her leave.
    Only in New York years later did I begin to feel how wrapped up in myself I was, and when I told Holfy about this, she told me I must ask him what happened. I couldn’t. Daddy had been through enough. I did not want to bring him more pain. This is only partly true. Fear and anger kept me quiet. I was not certain what I was afraid of but I knew I was angry for being left out. Five years later when I did ask him, I did it in Lone Tree, four and a half thousand miles away. Daddy had only recently decided he could afford a telephone and when it rang he associated it with danger and expense. He went quiet when I asked him about the scattering. I don’t remember about all that, he says. The contempt I am trying to rid myself of rises up. He isn’t even sure where the hill is.
    â€”Paddy didn’t walk all the way with me if that’s what you mean. I walked on a bit on my own. It was a lovely day. Very still. There wasn’t a sound or a murmur anywhere. I got to where I thought was a good spot and said a little prayer, and I opened the urn and scattered the ashes. But just then a wind came up and blew the ashes in my face. It got in me eyes. Paddy said to go for a pint but I didn’t think that was right so he drove me back to the house.
    I am shaken when he tells me the story, not because of the wind, I can dismiss that as pure chance, but because he tells it so succinctly. I understand in the calmness of his voice how I have wronged him. He is an old dog after being abandoned by his owner and having no understanding of why he is alone. I see him differently through the few letters he has sent to me in America. Tentatively, humbly, he offers his son advice. He says he knows nothing of life and says he makes many mistakes. His age shows in the shakiness of his inelegant handwriting. His letters with their dates and their regular indentations at the beginning of every paragraph remind me that he is not just from a different generation; he is a man from a different era. And, despite the poverty he endured in the early years, he had held us together as a