Away (4 page)

She has spent the past month preparing for the eventuality
of this last evening and tomorrow’s last morning. Entering the old house now she stares at the furniture, the drawers and crevices she has filled with messages – messages to no one in particular. Small bits of paper are taped to the legs of tables and to the seats of chairs; they are pinned to sofas and hooked rugs. They clutter up boxes of costume jewellery and hang from the ends of old tools in the woodshed. Even the odd pane of new clear glass has a story attached to it. Depending on her mood, she had written either something simple – “John broke this one … he was not punished” – or something more precise and factual, listing dates, events, and places. Occasionally her own emotional history was recorded. On an old copper boiler she had written the words “I wept for joy. The lake was calm and light engorged the kitchen”; words that will mean nothing to the others who find them. Attached to the metal case of a gold pocket-watch that rests alone on the dining-room table is a luggage tag, and on this is written, “There was often one of us who was away.”

If the case were to be opened, no timepiece would be revealed, only thin glass under which rests a lock of black hair, braided together with a red-golden tress and fashioned into a circle. Near this lies a bone hairpin around which is twined a single long thread of the same red-golden hair, a shard of turquoise china, and one black feather, old, torn, and seemingly neglected.

The smooth wooden stairs creak under Esther’s feet as she advances down the hall to the large room with the view of the lake. Outside, the poplars at the front of the house are catching the fire of the final sunset. Because the wind has picked up and the lake has grown restless, it is difficult to separate the clamour of approaching machinery from the crash of waves on beachstones. Esther thinks of the million-year-old fossils that decorate these stones and how the limestone record of their
extermination has brought about the demise of her own land-scape, the enormous hole in the earth, the blanket of concrete dwellings that is obliterating the villages she knew as a child. As she climbs into the sleigh-bed that has always been in this room, she knows that what she wants is to give shape to one hundred and forty years. She wants to reconstruct the pastures and meadows that have fallen into absence – the disassembled architecture, the great dark belly of an immigrant ship, a pioneer standing inland stunned by the forest, a farmer moving through the beams of light that fill his barn.

Esther pulls the quilt up closer to her neck as the cool lake air reaches her from the window. She will not sleep on this final night, instead she will tell herself the long story until dawn, the way old Eileen had told it to her during after-school twilights.

In her mind’s eye, the young girl her great-grandmother was flickers like a distant torch on the opposite side of an ocean. Esther sees the dance old Eileen’s arms performed as she told the story, her hands moving like moths towards the flame.

At the quarry the men will work all night, shifting the gears of their machines under artificial light.

Esther, too, will work all night whispering in the dark.

A
T
first it was believed that Mary would die; that she would waste away, abandoning a body that had already been “left behind.” As time went by, however, and she seemed stronger and more beautiful than ever, it began to appear that other steps would have to be taken. She did nothing but sing quietly – there was no other form of speech – the songs she had invented during her night vigil with the corpse. She performed her chores methodically and easily – too easily, her mother thought – as milk turned to butter with a few light touches of the churn and eggs were produced by hens the moment the girl stepped outside to collect them. Her bread rose to ridiculous heights in the oven and the sweet berries for which the islanders spent hours searching began to appear in profusion all around her mother’s cabin.

As streams of golden tea poured from silver teapots all over the island in the following months, the women, young and old, considered the predicament. They feared Mary, but did not wish to offend her, fearing the retribution of “the others” more. They wondered if she would bring a changeling into the world and, if so, what dark powers it would have. Some of them secretly hoped that the girl had been given the ability to do cures, particularly for the complaints of women and the diseases of children.

The men, when they gathered round their turf fires at night, never mentioned Mary’s name at all, but a mental picture of
her stirred their thoughts and sometimes their groins, leading them to believe that they must avoid her altogether lest they begin to be astray themselves. One by one they crept into the damp church on the bay, slipped behind the dark curtain of the confessional, and whispered their secret longings into the ear of Father Quinn. It was when this venerable person, himself, started having unsettling dreams concerning red hair and snow-white breasts that he decided something must be done before the whole island became possessed.

Father Quinn was not a young man, but not so old as to be beyond desire. When he awoke some mornings, his normally severe countenance in the silvered glass seemed altered, inflamed by something just beneath the skin that wanted to burst out. Mary might have been in his dreams all night disguised as a tree or even as a single leaf moving in the breeze just beyond his grasp, and he straining to touch it. All day, then, he would be remembering the veins of that leaf and its delicate structure.

It was with a great deal of reluctance that he climbed the road that led from Church Bay to the girl’s cabin. He would swing incense over her, thoroughly drench her with holy water. He brought along his censer, a glass vessel filled with liquid, and a chip of the tooth of Saint Patrick. He carried dried stems of heather with which to thrash the “other” from her if need be. He had begun to pray before he left his cold rooms at the back of the church, and he had continued to pray as he fortified himself with a drop of the miraculous whiskey stored conveniently nearby. He prayed that her cheeks would fade, her bosom sag, her teeth rot, and her eye lose its lustre. He prayed that her waist would thicken and that a wart would grow on her nose. And he prayed that if the Lord could not arrange these alterations he himself would cease to be tormented by
her, her infirmity would cease to be his affliction, that she would be taken completely by “the others,” and that nothing disturbing would be left in her place.

Mary, however, had gone, as she did on certain days now, down to search for he who had been given as a gift to her. He had fallen into her life as Wednesday falls into the middle of the week, and it was often Wednesdays that she sought and found him. Her pale swimmer. It was Wednesday when he had washed into her arms, and he would crash over her, she knew, every Wednesday for eternity. Her wave. Her breaker.

Wednesdays she woke with the smell of the sea in her room, her mouth requesting fire and salt and her arms aching. Something like thunder shook the furniture of the cabin and beyond its walls fuchsia and whitethorn trembled. She ate handfuls of her mother’s precious peppercorns and rubbed her thighs until they burned with the turf that awaited the fire, until her body, inside and out, shrieked and sang, and the little grey village outside the window stepped backwards and withdrew. Then she burst from the house to the sea, in fever.

She bathed immediately, loving the weight of drenched clothing that pulled her farther into the sea and then the lightness of her limbs as she threw her clothing back to the shore. She floated, and waited.

His song was like no other song. It rasped and whimpered and told her secrets she had known for centuries. Her arms were full of him, he entered her and passed right through her. He enveloped her like her own skin and she a stone sinking under his weight. He forced her to want other elements to breathe beyond that which was available in the ordinary air, and then, moments later, the air was no longer ordinary. If she had been asked to describe him, she would have said that he
was the exact spot where the sea touches land, the precise moment of the final reach of surf. That was the place and the time of him. She would forever, then, seek shorelines and beaches.

Father Quinn dragged his equipment laboriously towards Mary’s door and was met by the handsome bulk of Mary’s mother leaning over her vegetable patch, examining the new green leaves of potato plants.

“I’ve come to bring Mary back, Norah,” he said, “by whatever means God sees fit.”

“Well, she’s not here,” said the woman. “Even she that is here is not here.”

“And what does this creature do all day?” asked the priest, trying to keep pictures of her red mouth and white throat out of his mind as he spoke.

“She’s mostly singing,” said her mother, “and whispering to someone I can’t see.”

“Does she pray, then?”

“No, it’s not prayers she’s saying.”

“Well, I’m certainly hoping that it’s you who are praying, Norah Slattery. This cabin will be needing all the prayers anyone might be whispering.”

“Sometimes it’s rhymes she says.” Mary’s mother looked embarrassed. “Rhymes,” she added, lowering her voice, “with words like heart and treasure and darling in them. The songs have those words as well.”

The priest’s own heart sprang in his chest and then quieted. His conscience slapped him hard. He wanted to hear these songs sung by Mary’s own mouth, and she singing them for him alone. He looked down at his censer and holy-water bottle lying on the earth where he had dropped them. They look
ridiculous, he thought, glinting in the sun with potato plants and weeds bobbing all around them.

“I’ve brought some holy water,” he said absently, “in case it might help. That and some incense.”

“She won’t be back till sundown, that’s certain,” said Mary’s mother. She picked up her apron and let it fall again, looking oddly girlish as she did so, despite her age and size. Then she turned her face away and made her confession. “I can’t help thinking, Father,” she said, “that she’s the same daughter that I gave birth to. Not a hair on her head has changed and she still calls me Mother. Is it, do you think, Father, that this is what ‘they’ would have me believing?”

“Consider this,” the priest replied. “ ‘They’ leave an exact replica of that which they’ve taken, in its place. This girl is an exact replica. She is here but she is not. The word ‘exact’ is important. Every hair that’s on her head is an exact replica of every hair that was on her head. Do you see it, Norah? There is nothing about her would have changed except that she is changed. The question is how to get her back. Sometimes it takes seven years. Sometimes they never come back. Sometimes they waste away.”

“Should I be turning her out of doors then, Father, if she’s not my daughter at all?”

“Ah no, Norah, for if Mary were to come back she would need to exchange herself, and she wouldn’t be able to find herself to exchange.”

“Oh,” said Mary’s mother, confused, “it’s like that then, is it?”

“Yes,” Father Quinn said in a tired voice, “that’s what it’s like … exactly.” He glanced at the tooth chip where it rested in its silver-and-glass reliquary. It looked powerless and decayed. For a moment he wondered whether it had been broken from a human, never mind a divine tooth. He thought of Mary’s
gleaming teeth, of her mouth. “That and her calling herself by a different name.” He was silent for a moment, thinking. “Still,” he said eventually, “it might be a good thing for her to be off the island, were she to leave it in a natural way.”

The moment he spoke these words he experienced a feeling of loss so shattering he was forced to catch his breath. Composing himself he added, “In a natural way, as if she really were Mary, not this … Moira.” He remembered her walking the roads of the island, her hair a-fly. Then he imagined the roads without her on them. He was not fond of the island’s roads, he decided; the hills, the sea stirred his heart, but not the roads.

“And what way would that be, Father?” Mary’s mother stood with her hands clasped piously in front of her.

“Death or marriage,” the priest said, surprising himself with the bluntness of his answer. “Both natural, so that if Mary came back she’d know where to look for herself.”

“But who would be marrying one who is away?”

“One who doesn’t know,” replied Father Quinn. “One who doesn’t know,” he repeated slowly, though he believed in his heart that there were plenty who would marry her skin and hair even if they did. “Or perhaps,” he continued, a new idea striking him, “one who knows but doesn’t believe.”

“In God!?” asked Mary’s mother, shocked.

“Doesn’t believe,” answered the priest, “that a person can be away at all.”

B
RIAN
O’Malley’s cottage was situated some two miles east of Ballyvoy in the collection of dwellings that went by the name of Coolanlough. Hills swept up on either side of it, rising to the cliffs a mile away. To approach these promontories you had to walk beside the still lakes known as Dhu, Faddon, and Crannog – the latter with its ancient man-made island floating on its surface. From the cliffs you could look at Rathlin Island and the waters of the Moyle that churned in front of it, or you could turn to the left and examine Ballycastle Bay and the town that rose behind it. With your back to the sea you could watch the swift shadows of clouds darken the surfaces of the already dark lakes. Below, on the beach, there might be one or two dulse gatherers and, to the left and right of Rathlin, fishing boats bobbing like small, floating sea birds. Moving purposefully past these curraghs might be the Rathlin-Ballycastle ferry. This small vessel knew no schedule, returned sometimes hours, sometimes days after it set out. Once when it was owned by Sean MacDonnell, who lived on the land, it wintered on the island. Once when it was owned by Fergus MacFee, an islander, it wintered on the land; its furious respective owners cursing God and the sea.

Father Quinn had been lucky and unlucky. The day was fair, the crossing easy. But unlucky because, since the day was fine, he was unlikely to find his friend Brian O’Malley at home. The priest carried a copy of Horace under his arm, guiltily, knowing that this was not the real reason for his visit. Normally the two
men met once or twice a month to talk about Latin, mathematics, and philosophy, and O’Malley’s cottage was the best place for that. But, Quinn reminded himself, he should be grateful that the walk from Ballycastle to Ballyvoy was not as lengthy as that to Coolanlough, and on a fine day Ballyvoy was where O’Malley was most likely to be found.