Shade
“A lyrical experiment in point-of-view . . . It’s not surprising that Jordan, writer and director
of The Crying Game and Michael Collins^
would have a lot to say about identity and sexuality, acting and observing, and politics. But as this quiet novel steps surely toward its powerful conclusion, it’s also a testament to the simple but profound power of storytelling.”—
Booklist
“Lyrically precise writing . . . The specific detail with which Nina describes her early years . . . and her experience of the movies’ transition from silent films to ‘talkies’ is invariably dramatic and interesting.”—
Kirkus Reviews
“With this fierce, dark and yet luminous novel, Neil Jordan once again demonstrates that he is one of Ireland’s most talented artists.”—
John
Banville
“Compelling, intriguing, precise and poetic, personal and political, at once a human drama and a fascinating metaphysical mystery,
Shade
courses its way, like the river Boyne that runs through it, steadily, patiently but, thankfully, never predictably—we should expect nothing less from the author of
The
Crying Game
—before reaching its final, heartbreaking denouement. Triumphant. ‘’—
Patrick McCabe
“The extraordinary
Shade . .
. restores Jordan to his Irish roots and, more particularly, to the intricate emotional landscapes of his early work . . . Jordan’s rich, visual prose is perfectly cadenced to this tragedy of misplaced love. Few writers can convey human loneliness in quite such an achingly spare, unsentimental form.’’—
Independent
“{Jordan] recreates the drained landscape with the vivid care of a Dutch painting, and infuses it with longing . . . Wonderfully elegiac . . . The book is powerfully visual.”—
Guardian
Praise for
Shade
‘Jordan’s lavish, meticulous portrayals of the brackish waters in Ireland, the crackle of shells in the riverbed underfoot, the bobbing heads of the dead in battle, help weave fiction and history seamlessly together . . . Jordan’s writing . . . easily communicates the nuances that shape the friends’ relationships, as well as the enthralling story that drives the reader to find out exactly why Nina was murdered.”—
San Francisco Chronicle
“The ways in which the children’s maturing love for each other plays out are unpredictable—sometimes staggering—and the final revelations . . . will bring a gasp of shock or admiration from even the most worldly reader.”—
Los
Angeles Times
“Jordan, who loves tricks and surprise endings, rises to his own challenge of keeping us in suspense even though we already know how the story is going to
end.”—
New York Times Book Review
“A feverish gothic tale . . . graceful . . . and deeply haunting.”—
Bookforum
“Jordan has endowed his shade with a rhythmically mesmerizing voice—eerie, yet deeply compassionate . . . Jordan’s evocation of childhood and youth in early 20th-century Ireland is wondrous to behold. His battle scenes are harrowing. The music of his prose is lush but not overwrought, attuned to nuances of emotion and landscape.”—
Newsday
“A haunting, compelling tale of friendship and loss . . . The layers of past and present are peeled away, tantalizing us with an ever-widening picture.”
—
St. Paul Pioneer Press
“{An} astounding novel that captures the exquisite pleasure and pain of childhood friendships.”—
East Bay Express
“Elegantly sober narration from beyond the grave distinguishes this ghost story from novelist and Oscar-winning filmmaker Jordan . . . Daring and well-
crafted.”—
Publishers Weekly
SHADE
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Night in Tunisia
The Past
The Dream of a Beast
The Crying Game
(screenplay)
Sunrise with Sea Monster
SHADE
A NOVEL
NEIL JORDAN
BLOOMSBURY
Copyright © 2004 by Neil Jordan
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the
publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical
articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Publishing,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, New York and London
Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers
All papers used by Bloomsbury Publishing are natural, recyclable products made
from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform
to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Jordan, Neil, 1951-
Shade : a novel / Neil Jordan
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-59691-820-7
1. Funeral rites and ceremonies—Fiction. 2. Murder victims’ families—Fiction.
3. Murder victims—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Ireland—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6060.O6255S53 2004
823’.914—dc22
2004009157
First published in the United States by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2004
This paperback edition published in 2005
Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield
Dear shadows, now you know it all
W. B. Yeats
Table of Contents
I
KNOW EXACTLY WHEN
I died. It was twenty past three on the fourteenth of January of the year nineteen fifty, an afternoon of bright unseasonable sunlight with a whipping wind that scurried the white clouds through the blue sky above me and gave the Irish sea beyond more than its normal share of white horses.
Even the river had its complement of white. It was a rare wind, I knew from my childhood by that river, that would mould the waves into runnels of white foam, but it was a rare wind that day. I had studied those black waters as a child, sat on the bank of its smaller tributary with the hem of my yellow skirt between my chin and knees, because waves and all of their motions held a strange fascination for me. From the inkily silver reflecting surface, untouched by air, to the parabolas of ripples that would appear and then vanish, to the regular lapping of small pyramids of water, to the sculpted crests with their flecks of white. It was those the river had that day, and more. A good force five, a sailor would say. And George, who killed me, had been a sailor in his time.
George killed me with his gardening shears, the ones with which he cut the overgrown ivy on the house and trimmed the expanse of lawn, hedge and garden that descended towards the mudflats and tributaries of the Boyne river. He had large hands, gardener’s hands, scarred in many places by the blades he wielded: shears, secateurs, lawnmower and scythe. He had one finger missing and a face marked with the memory of fires long ago. If one could have chosen one’s killer, needless to say one would not have chosen George. One would have chosen softer hands, or more efficient ones, the kind of hands that you see in films or read about in books. Definitely five-fingered hands, that could smother easily, break a neck in one gesture. But life, as we all know, rarely imitates fiction, nor does it move with the strange efficiency of the films I once acted in. And if George’s life had prepared him for anything, it was to deliver me a death that was, like the house, Georgian.
He held the shears to my neck in the glasshouse, and with quite spectacular clumsiness opened a moonlike gash on my throat. He mistook my loss of consciousness for death, then brought the world back to me while he dragged me through the roses, the world with its scudding clouds above. He watched the last of my blood flow into the muddy channel and augmented it with tears of his own. He decided against a watery grave and carried me like a lifesize doll to the septic tank, then realised I was still living while lowering me in. He spent one last energetic minute severing the head from the body he had known, in one way or another, since his early childhood. And so my last sight was not of sky, sea or river, but of his blood-spattered watch on his thick wrist, and the time on that watch read twenty past three.
Time ended for me then, but nothing else did. I can’t explain that fact, merely marvel at the narrative that unravels, the most impossible and yet the commonest in the books I read in that house as a child. The narrator for whom past, present and to some extent the future are the same, who flips between them with inhuman ease. My Pip is my Estella and both are my Joe Gargery, and what Joe says to Pip I would say to George. What larks, Pip.
So there I am, aged seven, rocking on the wooden swing beneath the chestnut tree at the bottom of the sloping field that curved below the grass-covered manhole. There are Gregory and George, behind me or beneath me. I’m worried about whether they can see my knickers, then oddly not worried at all, staring at the tall, sad woman who is staring back at me, dressed in a grey fur coat, black beret and a pair of Wellington boots. This woman is me, and they are my gardening clothes. I have an attitude of elegance, despite the tufted coat, I am smiling, despite the air of angular sadness, and I am my own ghost. I am glad I didn’t know that then, glad the girl that I was could luxuriate in this comforting presence, this familiar, without knowing how familiar it actually was.
But I knew, when he finally deposited my remains in that septic sphere, replacing the covering of rusted metal, smoothing the grass above it with his bloodied nine fingers. I knew it all then.
You saw me play Rosalind in the school hall, George, I would have said if I could. But of course I couldn’t and his name twisted into anagrams in whatever consciousness I had. George, Eorgeg, Egg Roe, Ogre, Gregory. Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love. But men
have
killed for love, endlessly.
And when he dumped me into my excremental grave it was perhaps in the dim hope that the body he’d longed for would seep one day where all the old effluent seeped, into the river and thence to the sea. And maybe it was an act of flawed, bruised affection, that attempt to send me into the mouth of the river I had loved, and into the final embrace of that sea, which had seemed to all of us, since childhood, infinite.
To have carried me into that sea, to have lowered me into the scarfed waters of that river, might have been love, a love at least that Rosalind could have mused upon. But corpses don’t seep like effluent. George, in fact, left me undiscovered in that undiscovered country, never to reach that sea or glimpse that shore beyond which is no other shore. He would be arrested, since the trail of blood and tissue would be as messy as it could have been. But forensics wouldn’t exhume my body, he had seen to that. The plot beside my parents’ grave in Baltray churchyard would remain unopened. And I would remain in a circle of old effluent within the sphere of a septic tank.
I look at myself, with eyes as preternaturally quiet as the eyes with which George looked at me that afternoon of scudding clouds, wind and murder. I could fear for myself, but fear will be singularly useless.. The girl that I was will follow her course and nothing I, her familiar, could do would prevent it. But there’s a comfort in her gaze and I’m trying to comprehend it. She is swinging, still, over the runnel of the larger river on that swing her father so carefully built her, swinging high, so she can see beyond the waters, beyond the dull green swathe of mud she will one day call Mozambique to where the white caps garnish the sea itself. I turn, to follow her arcing gaze towards the shore beyond which is no other shore, and her face comes level with the back of my head, and I feel the wind of life brush my dead hair into movement and I turn again and find myself looking directly into those wonderful eyes.