Authors: James Lawless
Her lips have turned blue with the cold. How easy it would be to kiss the pink back into them.
It is growing dark as we walk through Saint Enda’s park. Suddenly she grabs my arm.
‘Phew. I got a fright,’ she says in English.
‘What?’
‘Did you ever see a bush in a shadow and think it was a man?’
‘In the Liberties there were no shadows.’
‘Just bushes.’
We laugh. The wind blows up, ruffling the trees.
‘Did you ever see a leaf shiver in the cold?’ I say.
Her smile disappears. ‘We should be talking in Irish.’
***
I am given a part in a play by
An Cumann Dramaíochta.
I have no inhibitions about acting publicly in Irish. I feel, perhaps somewhat like Mam in her letters, that the language itself acts as a disguise to shelter me. (Could it also have some little thing to do with the fact that my newly discovered Sinéad is involved in the production?). We rehearse in the Damer Hall near Saint Stephen’s Green. In such circles I am known as Deiric Ó Foghlú, the only son of Pádraig Ó Foghlú, the deceased diplomat.
One becomes a different person in a different language.
In Spain I was called
tranquilo
, but I am not reticent in English. And in Irish my name conjures up a person who dances
céilí
and likes the sound of the
bodhrán.
But my preferences are pop, jazz, and increasingly, classical music. In England my Irish name conjures up other names: Paddies, navvies, papists, and images of drunkenness, or of terror and the IRA.
Why did my mother christen me Derek when she was such a strong
Gaeilgeoir?
I mean whatever happened to good solid Irish names like Fiachra or Rónán? Gaelic names could conceal identities to prevent victimisation by West Brit employers or entrapment by the British army. By calling me Derek, was my mother trying to expose me in some way? Was she trying to say I only half belonged?
***
Sinéad is in charge of the lights for the play. She has spent her summer in the Gaeltacht and delights in showing off her
blas. ‘Goidé mar ataoi
’’ she says, instead of the usual
‘Conas atá tú?’
I can’t discover who Sinéad really is under her masks of Gaeltacht accent and rhetoric and republicanism (the only time she goes to a pub is to sell the IRA organ,
An Phoblacht)
. I don’t know what food she likes to eat, or whether she ever thinks about sex. I would like to ask her out, to go to the cinema perhaps, just to get away for a while from the claustrophobia of this pure Gaelic world. But there is no point in asking her to go to the movies with me. The foreign cultures represented by films would contaminate the purity of Pearse’s vision (echoing Gearóid’s outcry to my mother).
‘Pearse was too good to be true,’ I say.
She gives me a disapproving look. ‘You only think about yourself.’
‘Perhaps, but in an objective way.’
‘There are needs in this country. The North for example.’
‘That’s just something else – one of many things trying to possess a person. I want to possess myself. Do you know who you are Sinéad? Do you really know?’
She doesn’t answer. She just gives me that look again and darts into the theatre.
I play the part of a young man with a vocation for the priesthood but tormented by the love of a girl. It is a common enough theme in Irish drama. After the first night’s performance I am told by the director that the
duine ar na soilse
(the person on the lights) failed to direct the light on me, and that I had spoken my entire part in darkness. Afterwards, Sinéad tells me that she couldn’t get the lights to work properly, but I know she is lying.
***
Another day she has to call to a drapery shop in Thomas Street – an errand for her tailor father. We pass by Saint Catherine’s church near which Robert Emmet was executed.
She blesses herself as she passes.
‘Roibeárd bocht.’
‘Hanged drawn and quartered,’ I say.
‘British justice.’
‘Imagine watching your own guts being cut out.’
‘Stop é sin.’
She walks ahead of me and turns down Cromwell’s steps.
There are ghosts everywhere she goes.
***
Some weeks later I am sitting in the Rathfarnham garden (I still can’t call it home), resting in a deck chair. It is not a warm day, but sweat is trickling down my face. I have
just tidied up the glasshouse and thrown out Patrick’s old seed trays, weedy now and mildewed. I’ve started on the old tree stump too; dug around it. I’ll work on it bit by bit. I feel good, a physical wellbeing, like I’m banishing ghosts.
I’m listening to a phone-in programme on my transistor radio. The presenter is being praised by lots of people, not only for using the Irish version of his name –
Tadhg Rua –
but also for promoting the Irish language on the national airways. He says
‘Dia duit’
at the beginning of each interview and
‘Slán leat’
at the end, and even sometimes throws in
‘Go raibh maith agat’
between an English sentence. I hear a voice phoning in,
‘Goidé mar ataoi?’
and then committing a broadcasting sin: it continues on in Irish. It is using the language for purposes other than the phatic. The voice is Sinéad’s. I wasn’t concentrating on what she was propounding (she came upon me so suddenly), something about Irish or the North.
Tadhg Rua
interrupts her fine flow of speech and tells her to speak in English. There is a slight hesitation on Sinéad’s part. She complies and finishes her points in English. Then the presenter says,
‘Slán leat agus go raibh maith agat.’
I meet her afterwards and she is very upset. Why hadn’t she asserted her constitutional right to speak the national language on the national medium? That presenter had no right to prevent her from speaking it. I try to empathise with her, tell her that she was a victim of linguistic tyranny. The presenter was only giving lip service to the language.
Tadhg two sides.
It was all an act, like what happens on Saint Patrick’s day. ‘How could I have been caught so much off guard?’ she says. ‘What will everyone think? Did your mother hear it?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘I wasn’t with her.’
***
It’s a sultry summer’s day when Sinéad gets the motor car. Her father bought it for her. She uses it to deliver pants and suits to draperies throughout the suburbs.
‘More and more made to order, less and less made to measure,’ Jack says about the suits as if all human frames are gradually being homogenised.
When I see the car, I laugh. It is a black Morris Minor, 1957 model.
‘You’re the first person under fifty that I’ve seen drive one of those. I bet it doesn’t go more than twenty miles an hour.’
‘Jump in and I’ll show you.’
‘How about going for a swim?’
‘We can collect our swimsuits on the way.’
We speak in Irish for a while. But the sun is shining, forcing a levity in us. Eventually she tires of trying to win me over.
‘If
Tadhg Rua
saw me now,’ she says in English, ‘he’d be laughing at me.’
‘Why should he? Your point was about freedom. You have the right to choose. There are
two
national languages.’
When we get onto the open road, she puts her foot down on the accelerator and the motorcar shakes like a sack of bones.
‘There’s a hole in the floor,’ I say.
‘That’s the emergency brake.’ She laughs and revs up the engine some more.
‘Sinéad, take it easy.’
‘Not till you take back what you said.’
‘What did I say?’
‘About Morris Minors.’
‘I take it back. Watch out.’
She swerves suddenly, but is unable to avoid hitting a
dog which was nonchalantly stepping off a kerb. The dog scurries for a bit, whining, and then lies down panting on the road, blood oozing from his head. We spread a newspaper on the back seat of the car and bring him to a vet.
Sinéad drives slowly for the rest of the journey. She’s upset about the dog. ‘Will it be all right?’ ‘They’ll look after it,’ I say. When we reach the sea, her humour improves, and we park the car and walk along the beach looking for a sheltered spot.
She slides out of her figurehugging jeans in a sanddune.
‘Don’t look,’ she says, and we both laugh out of the well of memory. And I wonder is it possible she may have left her ideological baggage in some faraway terminal to be collected later?
We run what seems like a half mile to catch the sea. I look at the wide, virtual emptiness of an Irish beach, and I think of the congestion of sprawling flesh frying under a Spanish sun. And I think of space and the lack of it, and single rooms with families and rent collectors knocking down doors, and it is easy to know why Liberties’ children love the seaside.
An extremely fat woman is the only person sitting on the beach. She sits on the hard, wet part of the sand that carries the marks of the waves’ undulations. She is wriggling under an enormous bathtowel. But there is no one looking. No one to give her even a cursory glance, except for me and some gulls.
An elderly man – someone’s father? – stands at the water’s edge. He wears a tweed overcoat and a cap – no respecter of seasons – and looks out to sea.
Sinéad submerges first – women are more courageous than men in a purely physical world. Goosepimples, which I thought were banished atavisms like chilblains, resurface on my arms.
The afterswim glow (some say it’s a better feeling than having sex, but I don’t know as yet), shivering, turning blue, then the blood warming; such variety of sensations in the fluctuating wind and sun, in contrast to an unvarying Mediterranean world. Puffs of cloud making the sky more interesting than an eternity of blue. The salt water falling like jewels from her brown hair; the beauty of things plural. The shape of her body through a wet swimsuit, the wonderful curves, the water dripping down her thighs, the smell of brine. The little Liberties’ girl transformed.
I embrace her and steal a salt kiss, a kiss I know that will always return to my lips wherever there is a grey sea.
We sit in the sanddune, arms entwined. I try to go further with my embraces, but she pushes me back with a gentle hand.
‘We can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘You are not ideologically attuned.’
‘What?’
‘Perhaps if you come north.’
‘You are trying to blackmail me. I don’t believe this.’
‘You’re still in the dark, Derek.’
‘What’s the North got to do with it? Why not here?’
‘Because up there we can increase and multiply, and ultimately gain a majority.’
‘You’re sick, Sinéad. You’d procreate just for that?’
She
was
sick. I felt that to her I was just a physical interjection, a comma in a concept, but I
was
attracted to her.
She looks out to sea towards the horizon.
‘From across that sea,’ she says in Irish, ‘that’s where the sickness came from.’
***
Sinéad is visiting my mother in her apartment. They speak in Irish. My mother speaks – reminisces clearly. Sinéad is solicitous about her. She fusses over her – fixing her cushions, filling the kettle for an umpteenth
cupán tae.
She is in awe of my mother, of her past. Looking at them both converse (like a family, dare I say?) makes me feel that impulse again to share my troubles with another human soul. But despite the years passing, I don’t know Sinéad – she doesn’t even know herself.
The television is on and the BBC is giving its weather forecast. Northern Ireland is marked with arrows for wind direction and symbols for rain as if it is not connected to any other land mass.
‘Look at the
amadán,
’ Sinéad says.
‘Fíor amadán
,
’
says my mother.
The meteorologist restrains his pointer stick from straying into the adjoining territory of Donegal. ‘And that’s the forecast for Ulster,’ he concludes.
‘We are invisible,’ Sinéad shouts. ‘They don’t understand anything.’
‘Nothing,’ says my mother.
I never saw Sinéad looking so angry. She clenches her fist. If she had had something in her hand at that moment I am sure she would have thrown it at the screen.
***
Sinéad does not finish her studies. She goes north. She joins the Civil Rights Movement and – never losing her interest in drama – plays a part in the ‘Battle of the Bogside.’ There is no shortage of light.
***
I fly through time like Jimmy with his magic patch in the comic books, but all the time my mind refuses to settle. How can it settle? It’s like a bee that can’t find nectar, and flits impatiently from shrub to shrub. From season to season, from year to year.
I manage to complete a Master’s degree and get a temporary position as a history lecturer in university. History suits me. I can flit in and out of time as I fancy.
I give a lecture called ‘The Function of Myth in History’. I stand at a podium and I look at a theatre rising up in a slope in front of me. The whole setting is theatrical – they even have projector lights to focus on things. But it is all non-tactile. I sense the room filling with thought, not bodies. The bodies are out of reach, half hidden by benches, faces appended to heads appended to shoulders and arms appended to hands; except for the front bench which is blackened by nuns writing furiously. I hear my voice: