Luther’s mother had loved three things: Kawasaki motorbikes, Dun Laoghaire’s west pier and her son. Luther’s graduation from college had coincided with her last week in the hospital. It was a happier time than most. They’d given her a room in a special wing and let her wear her own clothes: a long, flowy green dress that hung from her frame even before she had lost all the weight. They buried her in that same dress.
Even now, he could picture her, arms folded behind her head, exposing veritable forests in her armpits, as she meandered on about a story she’d heard once; about a one-legged postman, a rabid priest, and a curious fish. She delivered it all with the ghost of a smile slightly curling the left side of her lips. Luther always expected an undercurrent of irony within it all, but he’d never asked her if it was there before she died. Maybe it was better not to know.
At the wake, she lay splayed out on the kitchen table, a hushed silence surrounding her still body. Luther hated how solemn she looked. The aunts and uncles and cousins – once, twice and third removed – all remarked on how beautiful she was, even then. They picked away at their funeral sandwiches in between comments; triangular, white bread with no crusts.
Too many people approached him at the funeral, telling him about his loss, giving heartfelt speeches to him about “herself”, or “yer wan”, like they didn’t even know her name. People he’d never met queued and queued to speak to him; her death had temporarily rendered him important.
Up there on the altar, the priest read from a stack of notes someone had given him. From his speech, Luther learned that his mother was well-loved and supported by her family throughout her prolonged battle with cancer. Supposedly, her brother, who had taken it upon himself to organise all of the arrangements after her death, had visited her almost daily. Luther hadn’t seen him once. Growing up, he’d heard that his mother’s family had slowly removed themselves from her when the pregnancy became too obvious to hide. Even in 2012, some Irish families hadn’t lost their old prejudices.
It was all he wanted to do as they lowered her into the ground. Though her arms were by her side, he wanted to fix them back to where they should be, to fix that half smirk onto her lips, to force her eyes open, and to see the light return. But he found himself standing still at the graveside, just watching it all happen.
Three years studying religion and philosophy at Trinity – what his Aunts agreed to be the best university in the country – and twenty-two years of general anxiety, and yet nothing could have prepared him for that day. For standing there. For letting his mother be remembered, in a way she had never lived.
When, after two and ten pints of Guinness, his uncle — her brother — told Luther that “she” was in a better place, he couldn’t bring himself to agree. Luther hadn’t seen him since his grandmother had passed years ago.
“Marian”, Luther said.
“Sorry?”
“Marian, use her name at least. You did know her, didn’t you?”
He walked away before his Uncle replied, finding himself too focused on an incessant pain behind his left eye.
Recently graduated and wholly unemployed amidst the worst financial crisis the country had ever seen, unsurprisingly, Luther was depressed. He lived alone amidst hyphenates: a pebble-dashed two-bed semi-detached house, his mother had left him in the will. One empty bed, and always at least four empty rooms. He started locking doors so he could pretend they didn’t exist.
The doctors first diagnosed him with severe stress-induced migraines. Luther was convinced he had brain cancer.
Reddit became an outlet, though he had never been much of an internet person. The doctors had advised a week’s rest and to stay away from bright lights (including the sun) and external stressors. Not that he wanted to go outside anyway. He tried to distract himself from the sharp pain in his head with the hopeful thoughts of the cancer taking hold soon.
Starting on the Irish subreddits, he soon moved into conspiracies. Luther next saw sunlight days later, when on a walk down to the pier. It was nine o’clock on a midsummer’s evening, and dark enough that the doctors might not mind him being out – he still tried to stick with their advice despite knowing their diagnosis was wrong. He debated wearing sunglasses, but didn’t want to be mistaken for one of the dry-robe-wearing, dog-walking, Range-Rovering inhabitants of the forty-foot pier.
He found that he believed a host of new things. He now knew that AI Jesus was being stored on a hard drive in the Cayman Islands, that the 2030 recession was caused by a period of excessive swallow migration and that Eamon Devalera was a member of a race of secret reptilians who seek to promote economic protectionism in smaller, recently constructed nation states. That last one was from an especially strange Irish history-focused account that regularly posted on r/Irishtruths, an offshoot from the r/conspiracytheories subreddit after it became “too mainstream”.
Luther would die soon. And he knew it. His mother would have wanted him to see the pier before he went. If he had it his way, she would have been cremated, and he could have spread her ashes out into the waves, but they had wanted to give her a “proper” catholic funeral. Somehow, she hadn’t thought to specify against that in her will. He had to console himself by looking out into the sunset, thinking of her, and her memory, and everything it could have ever meant.
The wind blew and pushed at his clothes, filling with the breeze, and his feet were close to the edge, close to jumping and hitting the sharp rock below, and so close to a body being pulled out of the waves in the coming days. Maybe weeks. It wouldn’t be the first corpse in Dun Laoghaire harbour.
But he worried that he wouldn’t succeed, that somehow he’d survive, and be left in even more pain than he was now. No, it was better that he let nature take its course.
Google told him that the median survival rate for glioblastoma patients is about 14.6 months, which felt like a while, but he reassured himself that he was probably noticing the symptoms long after the tumour had been present, so he might only have a month or so left. Plus, it felt like an especially severe case, so maybe only a few weeks.
He checked himself into the hospital the next day, hoping for good news. They scanned him, noticed nothing, gave him a prescription for painkillers he could have bought over the counter anyway, and strict instructions not to take up any more of their time. Supposedly there were more severe cases.
In between shifts on Reddit and 4chan, he spent a large portion of the next week with his head in a microwave. The door had to be left open for obvious reasons, but it wasn’t the heat he was looking for; it was the radiation. Between that and the X-rays he’d made them do at the hospital, he hoped to be helping along the tumour in its growth.
Google told him that many groups – especially women and minorities – were often left undiagnosed by doctors due to their underrepresentation in medical circles. Luther wasn’t in any of those groups, but currently, he found that he could empathise with them.
After about a month of microwaving himself, cooking on heavily scratched nonstick pans and getting as sunburnt as an Irish July would allow (the tanning salon off of Georges Street had closed two years prior), he returned to Tallaght Hospital triumphant and without an appointment. They rejected him in the waiting room, not even letting him see a doctor.
He was gently herded out of the room by security, as one would guide a stray dog who probably has some form of rabies, and was told to call the number of a grief counselling service. 1800807080 – They had written it on a pink sticky note. The security guard was watching him, so he put it in his wallet.
Luther hated phone calls. He hated not being able to gauge someone’s reactions when he was speaking; not knowing if they were about to speak or whether they were only talking to him because they didn’t want to be the one to hang up.
No, he wouldn’t be calling the number. He’d only walk to the pier in darkness now. He had stopped going outside in sunlight entirely, losing confidence in one of his previous techniques after finding out skin cancer could take years to develop, and generally relied upon the presence of moles, of which he had very few. He’d pray — first standing, then kneeling, always starting in English, but it would devolve into a broken gibberish, with adequate breaks for sobbing.
The pain seemed to lessen at times when Luther was at the pier, but he could never tell whether that was imagined or not. Once, he even got close to calling the phone number, but he lost momentum halfway through, and his hand soon fell limp by his side. And so it continued.
Soon, he was at the pier every night, for hours at a time. This was a pilgrimage of sorts; somewhere to feel closer to something – either nature, his mother, or both. Week after week, he’d pray. Once he fell asleep, he slumped forward on cool concrete, as the waters below softly whispered in a familiar voice.
He woke to the sun piercing his closed eyelids. It still hung low over the waters of the horizon when he began his walk home. Sleeping for a few hours on the pier ruined Luther’s chances of getting his usual sleep during the day. Instead, he tried scrolling Reddit, but found the usually comforting theories to be more nonsensical than usual.
Luther was sitting on the sofa in his living room when he finally called the number. A man with a voice like a smoke alarm told him they had a “session” at the Lexicon Library later that week. Luther didn’t know what that meant, but he thought he might as well go anyway.
He came late, the pressure in his temples mounting. They sat on foldable metal chairs in a clearing of bookshelves in the far corner of the building. The man leading the discussions, whose nametag read Oisin, greeted Luther with a surprised hello. The rest of the room stayed silent.
Oisin wasn’t the kindest or the most charming of men, but he did at least seem sincere. Later on, he asked how recent it was. Two months ago, Luther replied. He was very conscious of the other people in the circle, so he didn’t say much more. There were maybe eight of them, widows, former parents and the likes. Luther was the youngest there, in appearance at least. One woman said she was forty-five, but her face had the deep folds of a woman twenty years her senior.
They all spoke throughout the first half of the session, save for Luther and an older man in the corner. He was well dressed, in the way of older Irish bachelors: suit trousers starting to fray at the hem, brogues freshly shined. It had probably been a decade since he had bought new clothes.
Luther couldn’t bring himself to pay attention to what people were saying. The pain still throbbed behind his eyes. His head felt fit to explode.
Five minutes before the end of the hour-and-a-half-long session, as Luther checked the clock again, the older man spoke for the first time. The love of his life had passed away twenty-five years earlier, a month before their retirement. They had planned to spend their later years in Nerja, a town in southern Spain.
“I always hoped I’d die before her; she would have coped with it better. She would have still moved away; she would have moved on. But she’s gone now, and I haven’t lived a day since.” The old man said.
The library maintained the tepid, sickly warmth Luther associated with care homes for the elderly. Luther felt the pain in his head reach its crescendo as sweat crept out from his pores. The thought of being captured by grief for twenty-five years terrified him. Unlike many of the others who had spoken, the older man didn’t cry, but Luther did.
The older man sought out Luther after the session. He had been attempting to leave, but was swiftly cornered. “How long has it been?” The old man asked. Luther didn’t reply; he was attempting to control his sobs. There were dark bags under the older man’s eyes. “I’m going for a drink now,” The man said, slowly moving closer. “I wouldn’t mind the company.”
The pain was becoming too much, so Luther dodged past the man and quickly found himself outside the library again. His feet knew where to go. In what felt like seconds, he was at the pier again. He sat on its edge, rapidly inhaling the salt-filled air and wondering again what it would be like to throw himself off of it. There were families and kids around, though, so he tried not to think about that too much. Maybe he could come back later on.
The pain told Luther to run, to curl into a ball, or to claw the skin from his face – anything but sit still. He tried to contain his sense of panic, tuning out the sounds around him and listening only to the waters below. Breathing in and out in tandem with the rhythm of the water. The wind brushed past his ear. He listened for the voice he thought he had heard before; her voice, his mother’s voice. The pain seemed to ease in anticipation.
But she never spoke. The waves, the winds and the people behind him all continued as before. He’d never find her here again.
Luther left the pier hours later, the pain in his head lessening.
—–
As he burst through a gust of wind, riding well past the speed limit on a green Kawasaki motorbike he would later admit to be a bad financial decision, Luther found that he was happy; more than that, even. It was increasingly hard to worry about anything that had previously bothered him. A sense of calm pooled over him as he skipped his third red light of the evening. He doubted the gardaí were out tonight.
Legal consequences seemed minimal in comparison to what he had been through. He had been careful enough to pick quiet roads so that the risk of hitting someone would be low. Luther dodged pothole after pothole with newfound ease; black tarmac extended ahead of him, while thick green hedges bordered the road on either side. His mind was painless and refreshingly empty.
