Away

INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR
Away

T
HE
women of this family leaned towards extremes.

All winter they yearned for long, long nights and short precise days; in the summer the sun in the sky for eighteen hours, then a multitude of stars.

They kept their youth – if they survived – well past their childbearing years until, overnight at sixty, they became stiff old ladies. Or conversely, they became stiff old ladies at twenty and lived relentlessly on, unchanged, for six or seven decades.

They inhabited northern latitudes near icy waters. They were plagued by revenants. Men, landscapes, states of mind went away and came back again. Over the years, over the decades. There was always water involved, exaggerated youth or exaggerated age. Afterwards there was absence. That is the way it was for the women of this family. It was part of their destiny.

Esther O’Malley Robertson is the last and the most subdued of the extreme women. She was told a story at twelve that calmed her down and put her in her place. Now, as an old woman, she wants to tell this story to herself and the Great Lake, there being no one to listen. Even had there been an audience of listeners, the wrong questions might have been asked. “How could you possibly know that?” Or, “Do you have proof?” Esther is too mature, has always been too mature, for considerations such as these. The story will take her wherever it wants to go in the next twelve hours, and that is all that
matters; this and the knowledge that for one last night she will remain beside the icy, receptive waters of the Great Lake.

She paints a landscape in her mind, a landscape she has never seen. Everything began in 1842, she remembers her grandmother Eileen telling her, on the island of Rathlin which lies off the most northern coast of Ireland. Esther allows rocks, sea, to form in her imagination. There would be a view of a coastline with cliffs. It was the morning that an unusual number of things came in with the tide, causing celebration and consternation among the islanders and permanently fixing the day itself in legends that are recounted around fires at night. “Your great-grandmother’s name was Mary,” Old Eileen had said to Esther. “She lived with her widowed mother in a cabin three fields from the sea. And it was Mary who was the first to approach the beach that morning.”

The night before, a furious storm had reduced the circumference of the island by at least ten feet. It had snatched over-turned curraghs from the shore and dispatched seven of Mary’s favourite boulders to God knows where. The sandy beach nearest the girl’s cabin had been made off with as well and had been replaced with a collection of stones resembling poor potatoes. No one – not even those who had spent some time on mainland beaches – had seen their like before and they were rumoured to have come from a land where no grass grew and nothing breathed. Parts of the neighbouring cliffs had tumbled into the ocean’s embrace, taking with them several sheep. It would come to be said that these animals had been replaced by less domestic and less stupid beasts who scuttled into the earth at first light and whose cries could be heard coming from the hills at twilight the third Sunday of every month from then on.

Esther has seen elemental upheavals of this nature from her own, Canadian parlour windows. Great Lake tantrums, she
calls them, Loughbreeze Beach uproars. Her house is solid but it has always responded to stimuli. Made of slender pine boards, lined with cedar, insulated with sawdust, it is alive with a forest life never experienced by walls of stone or brick or cement. When the vehement storms that mark the end of summer come tumbling in over the lake, each gust of wind, each eruption of thunder, is felt in the house’s timbers, until, late at night, in the confusion of sleep, the women of this family have been known to believe that the house has
become
the storm; that some ancient quarrel is going on between that which is built and that which is untouched, and that the house might fling itself in a moment of anguish into the arms of its monstrous liquid neighbour.

The old house on Loughbreeze Beach is like a compass situated on the southern boundary of the province called Ontario, on the extreme edge of the country called Canada. Each of its many windows gazes stolidly towards one of four principal directions. When Esther looks to the east she sees a germinating jetty from where, over the course of time, things, in her life, had moved away. When she gazes to the south she sees the ever-present lake and its horizon. To the north lies the cedar wood, beyond which a threatening piece of machinery can occasionally be glimpsed. And past the orchard – in the west – the pier, the conveyor belts, the freighters of the cement company clutter up the shore of the lake.

Over the years the women of the family who have ventured out into the world have carried pictures of Loughbreeze Beach with them in their minds; its coloured stones shining through water, the places where fine pebbles give way to sand, certain paths the moon makes across the lake’s surface on autumn mid-nights. And some of the girls in the family were unable to leave the lake at all. It was in them to seek forever the beaches they
were born near and to walk in landscapes where something liquid glistened through the trees.

A hundred and forty years before and thousands of miles away, the girl Mary had been the first to witness the beginning of the miracle. Stumbling across the new stones whose texture made walking difficult, she had turned to face the ocean which had robbed her of her favourite boulders. She had been, in those early days, cursed with the gift of eloquence – a gift that would be taken from her forever one hour later. The sea responded to her rant by turning an odd shade of whitish green and swelling up as if it were about to reveal a hidden volcano, and Mary watched, stunned, as thousands of cabbages nudged one another towards the shore. Soon the vegetables completely covered the new stones while behind them the ocean was divided into bands of colour; darks and lights separated by ribbons of glitter. The glitter, it turned out, consisted of a large quantity of silver teapots, so perfectly designed against spillage that they proved very seaworthy as they bounced cheerfully towards the beach. The darker bands revealed themselves to be barrels of whiskey – enough barrels of whiskey to keep any who might want to be, drunk every Saturday night for decades. Flung across two of these barrels was, as Mary gradually perceived, a human form; its head thrown back, one half of its face hidden by a profusion of dark, wet curls. As the barrels that carried it approached the shore, Mary waded through fifty clanking teapots to meet it, and found an exhausted young man who, when she grabbed his shirt in her fists, opened two sea-green eyes and spoke the name Moira before falling once again into semi-consciousness.