The summer Michael turned twelve, his father, a crane operator in Millwall, took him to the British Museum. They went up the steps, through the doors and into the main foyer. Stopped there. Looked up at the domed ceiling. It was off-white with gold coffers, a simple design. This was the first time Michael saw how set apart they were. Maybe it was a matter of education, or class, but everyone else entering that building kept going, right past it, as if they’d seen a hundred such ceilings before. When he thinks about it now, he remembers how they spent the day wandering around, both of them amazed at the smallest things: Egyptian combs, a bent sunflower pin, cuneiform carved on the side of a stone. But what he thinks of most is that ceiling. Not the Sutton Hoo exhibition, the photographs of the site, the archeologists in their garrison caps and fedoras, a large pit behind them; but the ceiling, and his father next to him, looking up.
Michael leans forward with the brush in his right hand, sweeping it back and forth over the peat. He pulls at a thin white root with his left hand, snaps it. Gerry and Una are due back from their break any minute. Then Michael can take one, walk around the field, get the circulation in his legs going again. His back is aching. Sitting up, lifting his arms
overhead, Michael breathes in and then exhales deeply. Listens. A group of frogs are sounding out in a nearby trench. Under that, there’s the dull roar of the tractor engines carried over the bog. Every now and again, the clang of machinery; once in a while, someone shouting. Sitting back on his heels, Michael undoes the buttons of his jacket. The clouds have moved past the sun. The wind coming off the lake has died down. The peat underneath him is warming up. Layers of it have been brushed and shoveled away, are drying outside the pit. With the sun comes the sound of kestrels. Shielding his eyes, Michael looks up. Sees nothing. When he looks back down and across the bog, he notes that the stockpiles in the sets to the west are coming along. They look like the spines of wild animals; black plastic covering the tops of the ridges like manes. Tomás’ crew is working their first set today, and looking north Michael can see three machines going. Tomás is milling one field while someone else ridges the field behind him. The harvester is two fields behind them. Tomás’ first set is coming along, although they’ve yet to move all the smaller ridges to the central field. Standing up in the pit, Michael sees the whole grid of the bog reaching out around him. The rich brown of it, a copse of bushes near the lake. He flexes his back muscles and stretches his neck, first to one side, then the other. Drops his chin to his chest, rolls his head back. Above him, a kestrel flying in wide circles. Michael imagines the bird looking down over the field, what it would see. A man standing in a small pit. The ground turned over around him. The bird thinking nothing of it and flying on.
Dialectics
HAVING lied to the administrator about his credentials, Dermot makes his way across Maam, a “guest” badge pinned to his shirt. He hops onto the light-rail car and takes a seat, hoping to find Michael. The two Bord na Móna workers on the far bench haven’t a clue about the dig.
“Sure, there’s always a dig somewhere.”
“Wouldn’t say now, where it might be.”
“You’ll likely be doing the circle for hours.”
“Pack a lunch?” The laughter is at his expense, but he finds Michael fairly easily, in the form of an orange WU sign posted at the edge of the fifth field.
“There’s your man now,” called out as he jumps off.
Michael’s been at it three days, with Una and Gerry helping out in the afternoons, the three of them working quietly, concentrating on the task at hand. At ten, when Michael sees Dermot crossing the field, he has two thoughts: How in hell’s name did he find me; and thank god for the company. Gerry, when he did talk, didn’t seem to have anything much to say, and Una tended
to stop working when the conversation got even remotely interesting.
Michael spends the next hour listening to Dermot yammer on about bogs. “The summer of 1919,” Dermot starts, “Alcock and Brown flew the first non-stop powered flight over the Atlantic. All was going well until the two men came in over Clifden.” He stops, takes a drag off his cigarette. “The wind shot up and the plane went ass over tail with it. Nose-down in Derrygimla Bog.” He kicks at the peat. “What’s ‘bogach’ in English, Michael?”
Michael racks his brains for the exact translation from Irish. “Wet or soft ground, or—”
“Soft ground. Good enough.”
Listing them off on his fingers, Dermot recounts for Michael some of the more interesting finds in Irish bogs. “A man’s hand in 1978; horsehair tassels; seventeen pounds of bog butter in small parcels, brought up here and there over a period of about a hundred years. A wooden wheel in Doogarymore. The Altartate Cauldron in Monaghan. The occasional clump of mediaeval animal dung. Musical instruments. Whole forests. The Lurgan boat out at Addergoote.”
Michael knows most of it, but listens to the drone of Dermot’s voice, the odd list. “The plane itself didn’t have time to sink. They hauled it out the next day with ropes and cattle. Did I tell you about a hand in ’78? And roads and bridges that the bogach took over. A thousand-year-old farmstead. The best pair of shoes as owned by old man Conneely’s father who, one night heading home from Screeb, walked a bit off the path, dropping down to his knees in the muck.”
Michael looks up at Dermot and shakes his head. Goes back to the bottom of the pit. Sticking out of the peat beside his right hand, he notices a thick piece of material, a kind of thread. He shuts his eyes and refocuses. Brushes the dirt away and with his fingers moves the clumps that surround it aside. Above him, Dermot is still yammering on. The part of the thread that was buried underground comes up out of the divot Michael clears with his finger. He brings it towards his face. Up close he can see it’s only a root, uniform enough along the top to be spun thread, the part he’s just unearthed uneven, the white roots more fibrous looking than the length Michael had first seen. He tosses it up towards Dermot, who doesn’t notice it hit the back of his leg.
After an hour of pacing outside the pit, Dermot steps in to help Michael dig. They’re three-quarters of a metre down into the soil and there’s a layer of calluna roots underfoot, like a thin mat they have to trowel through. Dermot watches Michael to see how much force he’s using in the digging. Watches him jab the trowel into the ground, heave the peat by the shovel full over the side of the pit and onto the dump site above.
“You’re grand company now,” Michael says, after a long silence. The two men have taken opposite sides of the excavation site and they back into each other every now and again. Michael makes quick work of his end; Dermot takes his time.
“What’s that?” Dermot says.
“What?”
“You’re whistling.”
“Didn’t notice.”
“You were.” And Dermot whistles the tune back at Michael, trying to place it.
“Brandenburg. Bach.”
Dermot stands up and stretches, looks out towards the machines in the next set of fields. Before the work started here, there would have been clusters of gorse and fern all over the bog—cottongrass, heather, asphodel. This time of the year there’d have been mounds of pink and yellow flowers, curlews near the lough. He knows the arguments for conservation, even goes that way himself when push comes to shove, thinks there are better ways to power the country. But the sight of the Lurgan boat, the idea of it being pulled out of the peat—fifteen metres long, an internal keel, some four thousand five-hundred years old—that’s another story. The ground giving history back. Something returned to you, long after it had been forgotten.
When the wind starts to come west across the bog, Dermot hunkers into the pit, leaning his back against the cut-away edge. Michael had wondered about Abbey, and Dermot snorted through his nose, said he’d heard she’d called to the pub, left a message for him, that she’d taken a few more shifts.
“But I thought she was due back four days ago?”
“She was.” Dermot left it at that.
“What about the fence?”
“It’s half finished.”
“Going well?”
“It’ll stand.”
Sitting in the pit, his jeans damp, Dermot reaches over his shoulder and grabs at the top layer of the bog, pulls a clump of
peat from the ridge overhead, brings it down and breaks it apart in his fist. “I might go to Dublin.” He says it slowly.
“After Abbey?”
Dermot looks over at Michael, who is digging out the peat in front of him with a trowel and then dumping it unceremoniously over the side of the pit.
“To live.”
Michael stops, turns to look at him. Sits back on his heels. “Dublin?”
“Maybe so.”
Michael shakes his head.
“I’m as lost here as I would be there,” explains Dermot.
“What about money?”
“I’d get by. I could find something.”
“Dublin’s changed.”
Dermot pulls a cigarette out of his pocket, puts it in his mouth, roots around for his lighter. Taps his left pocket. Finds it. Shielding the cigarette from the wind, he tries twice to light it.
“It’s very cosmopolitan, very EU now. You won’t recognize it.” Michael is still shaking his head.
“That’s what I was hoping.”
That evening, mud is tracked into the house, but Dermot doesn’t say anything. It would have never crossed his mind before, but Abbey had started to straighten the cottage up, put things away. She’d even kept at Dermot to take his boots off by the door when he came in. Today he leaves them on and as he heads to the refrigerator, clumps of mud drop off, scatter
over the kitchen floor. Michael’s boots are just as bad and when he sits down at the kitchen table, falling into the chair, a layer of dirt drifts down off him.
“It’ll be the death of me, that bog.”
Dermot winks at him. “You’ll conquer it yet.” He opens the fridge, leans in and moves a few jars around on the metal racks. “Any preference for dinner?” Flagon comes into the kitchen, stands behind him. “I’ve cheese for a sandwich.” He backs out holding a plastic Spar bag.
“That’ll be grand.”
“Dublin?” Michael says again.
“It has to be something.”
“But Dublin?”
“Spiddal. Galway. Dublin. An leabhar céanna.”
Dermot waits for Michael to beg for a translation. When the sandwich is ready, Dermot places it on the table in front of Michael, who ignores him, bites into the sandwich, swallows without chewing.
“That means it’s the same book, that it’s all the same,” says Dermot. He walks over to the kitchen window and moves the curtain aside, leans over the sink and looks out. The framers have started on the interior of the nearest bungalow and they’re pouring the foundation of the bungalow just down the road.
“Do you want another sandwich?”
“Might do.”
“I’ll have to go for bread.”
Michael puts the last bit of crust into his mouth and wipes the crumbs off the table and onto the floor. “Don’t bother, I’m grand.” He stands and puts his hand on Dermot’s
shoulder, looks out the window at the bungalows. “She’ll be back. Give her a few more days.”
“Will she?”
“Yes.”
“What makes you so sure?”
Dermot goes into the front room, turns on a lamp and sits at the big table. A series of books he’d pulled off the shelf are spread out around him. Michael picks up
The Life of Anselm of Canterbury
. Opens it and flips through it. A number of pages are dogeared, and he discovers a handwritten receipt for eight pounds, dated 1972, at the start of Chapter Four, Hanna’s Books on Nassau Street. Another piece of paper, crisp, falls out a few pages on. There’s a passage underlined in black pen: “He does not exist in place or time, but all things exist in him.”
Dermot looks up. “Anselm is it?”
“It is.”
“Useless wanker.”
Michael smiles, puts his hand on Dermot’s back. “I’m off.”
“Suit yourself.”
Closing Time
ABBEY throws a chip across the sidewalk and into the grass. A duck waddles up from the edge of the pond. He’s nearly there when a seagull darts at it, hops a few feet away with the chip in its beak. Stands in the shade of the park bench guarding it. Abbey checks her watch. She’s due back at Connor’s at six for the evening shift, has been taking work left, right and centre, doesn’t care how many hours. And Veronica has agreed to spread it out on her cheques so it doesn’t reflect the fact that yesterday, for example, she worked fourteen hours. Suspicious, she’d asked Abbey at the end of the night if she was trying to save enough money to fly home.
Abbey misses Dermot. She hadn’t thought it would be like this, had expected more of a choice. Maybe it’s Dermot’s silence, the act of letting her go, the fact that he’d let her have the last word, even if it was a lie. She was supposed to have returned five days ago. He hasn’t called, and Abbey’s given up on phoning the cottage, has started to leave messages for him at Hughes.
Closing her take-away container Abbey looks around for a trash bin. Her cod has gone cold. On the next bench two girls wearing green and white Dunnes uniforms eat sushi and complain about their manager. Their hair up in clips, as if they work in a kitchen or bakery. Abbey stands up and heads for the gate, drops her container in the bin. Eyes the statue of O’Donovan Rossa. Once out on the sidewalk she waits with a dozen other people for the light to turn. A couple on the other side of the street carry grocery bags, the backs of their hands touching. The last time Dermot came to Dublin he and Abbey had a picnic in Stephen’s Green. He bought a bottle of wine, grapes and cheese at Dunnes, and they sat over by the northeast corner of the park, away from the benches. The weather was miserable—cold for November, and damp. It started to rain. Eventually they went over to Kildare Street and got into the Mini. His hands on her in the car, the two of them laughing. What is different now? How have things changed between them? Part of her is afraid of him. At least that’s what he says—that she’s afraid this is it, that if she stays with him she’ll be circling his moods, his needs, the rest of her life. That she’s afraid he might need her the way her father did. Abbey recalls the look on him, on Dermot’s face, when he said it. Standing in the kitchen after a fight, a broken tea pot on the floor between them, and the realization that it might be true, that he would insist she be subservient, that he didn’t know how to be with someone any other way. But she’s not afraid of him, not in the way he thinks she is. What she’s really afraid of is that she’ll give herself to him fully and it won’t be enough.