Cushla Lavery’s grief and depressive withdrawal

Cushla Lavery’s grief and depressive withdrawal follow Michael Agnew’s killing and the consequences of her efforts to shelter the McGeown family. Her retreat is both intimate and public: she struggles with elementary tasks in her bedroom while losing her work, her place in the town, and the ordinary routes through which she once moved. The novel gives this condition material form in the objects she keeps close, the people she avoids, and the futures she repeatedly imagines but cannot bring to a conclusion.

The Shape of Grief

Gina Lavery brings a tray to Cushla in bed, and Cushla finds it strange to be mothered when she has never felt less like a child. The scene establishes a reversal in their relationship: Gina is caring for her daughter, but Cushla’s awareness of that care does not restore her ability to take up daily life. She searches the blankets for cigarettes and a lighter. The first drag makes her feel sick, yet she holds the smoke in her lungs until the nicotine begins to register. These small actions are among the few movements she can manage without turning them into an effort.

The light outside marks time passing without her participation. Gina opens the curtains and raises the sash window; long shadows cross the room, and summer is nearing its end. Cushla has hardly noticed the season go by. When Gina leaves the bedroom door ajar and vacuums the landing, Cushla gets up to draw the curtains again. She stands beside the window and moves with the fabric, then recognizes the futility of hiding. If the authorities come for her, she expects they will ring the bell, and she will go with them. Her brief attempt at concealment shows how the questioning remains present even in a private room, while her own understanding of its likely course makes the gesture feel pointless.

Time, Memory, and the Anticipated Trial

Cushla measures the aftermath in overlapping intervals: twenty-seven days since she was questioned, thirty since she left the McGeown family near Short Strand, and thirty-five since Tommy McGeown killed Michael. No news comes of Tommy’s trial, but Cushla has already staged it repeatedly in her imagination. The courtroom is assembled from television and legal drama, with bright lights and tiered mahogany benches. On some days she places herself beside Tommy in the dock; more often she imagines taking the stand before the people who might judge or watch her.

Her imagined audience brings together those implicated in the losses and consequences around her: Joanna Agnew, supported by Dermot Agnew; Jim and Penny; Jane; Victor; and Betty McGeown, alone. Michael is the conspicuous absence. In Cushla’s mental courtroom, he has been reduced to photographs, forensic analysis, autopsy reports, and the clothing kept as evidence. The contrast is severe: the living can be arranged as spectators, witnesses, or accused, while Michael can appear only through records and objects. The trial remains a rehearsal rather than an event, but its repeated construction gives her fear and bereavement a fixed public setting.

Objects and the Work of Mourning

Cushla wakes with the impression of Michael’s cardigan stitches on her skin. She brushes ash from it with a licked finger. His smell has faded, but she continues to value the knitted patterns: blackberry, honeycomb, diamond, and the turning row where the cable crosses itself. The attention to those details makes the garment more than a keepsake. It preserves a form of closeness through touch and pattern after the person who wore it is gone.

Nearby, Davy McGeown’s missal and medals sit with The Black Prince, Michael’s key, and a bar of soap. The novena Davy had read in jest is part of the arrangement too, though it did not save him from being killed. Cushla sees the collection as a Havisham-like assemblage, held together by loss rather than practical use. Its mixture of religious objects, ordinary possessions, and reminders of the dead and displaced turns the bedroom into a private archive of interrupted lives. She now recognizes something of her mother’s grief in the heaviness that keeps her at the centre of the bed. Washing, eating, and standing up have each become tasks requiring an effort out of proportion to their simplicity.

Isolation and the Limits of Care

Since Gerry Devlin left, Cushla has seen no one apart from Gina and Eamonn Lavery. When Eamonn visits with the children, she stays out of his way; there is now a third child, another daughter. Her withdrawal therefore reaches even into family contact. The Lavery business is also deteriorating. Leslie drinks in the bar frequented by soldiers, Minty no longer acknowledges Gina in town, and Fidel still comes occasionally with men he used to meet privately above the shop. After those visits, Eamonn finds cigarette burns in the carpet and upholstery. Catholic customers have drifted away, unwilling to be seen as approving the Laverys’ sheltering of the McGeowns. Jimmy is the only person who still comes every evening.

The social retreat is sharpened by Cushla’s inability to reach Davy. Before leaving, Gerry tried to find out where the boy had gone, but did not know which doors to knock on in Short Strand. Cushla herself once drove east until she could see the place where she had left the family, then turned back, frightened by the opposing signs and walls and by the possibility that she was being followed. Davy’s letter eventually reaches her. He writes in the school format she taught him, but the news brings no reunion: he has been placed with a foster family, while Mandy is somewhere else. The children she tried to protect are safe from the immediate danger only by being separated from one another and from her.

Gina urges Cushla to see Dr O’Hehir because she is not eating and has not left the house for weeks. Cushla resists the suggestion of medication and sets out the conditions that make leaving difficult: she has lost her job, is barred from the family pub, and believes the town sees her as a Republican sympathizer. The places available to her feel sharply limited. Her reply imagines a walk down High Street, a visit to the police to ask whether they have found evidence against her, and an ice cream before speaking with Fidel and his mother. The list is pointedly ordinary, but each proposed stop touches the scrutiny and exclusions that have narrowed her life. Her willingness to entertain a walk does not resolve the grief; it shows the small, ironic terms in which movement back into the world can still be imagined.