The Lost Souls' Reunion (11 page)

*   *   *

One night Antonio asked to talk to me.

I gave Fanny a look that made her wait for me.

‘I give you thirty pounds if you let me,' Antonio offered, annoyed that Fanny had not gone away. ‘Me and my friend, together.'

‘Well, love,' she said after he had gone. ‘Mine was given away for nothing to a wanker who left me with wet knickers. It's good money. By the looks of him, by the swagger, I'd say he won't last more than five minutes.'

 

13 ∼ The Way Home

I
PUT THE
thirty pounds in my pocket walking up the stairs. The sulphur smell snaked under the unopened door.

I felt the hard walls close in around me, I moved quickly, expecting to find Carmel passing her fingers over flame or pressing it against her flesh and watching it blacken. I had doubled the knots I tied her with and still she found a way out of them, tearing at them with her teeth until her gums bled, lying in the foulness she could not contain.

I thought my eyes deceived me. Carmel sitting at the table, drawn to a flame held by an old woman. This could not be Myrna. The woman tall as life was bent over and the fine bones turned to gaunt longings for lost flesh and muscle.

The aged shadow of Myrna talked soft and soothing to Carmel, she talked like a river and the flame flowed like a river and my mother was quiet with watching. My mother's eyes closed and her head rested on her arms. The red marks of bondage on her wrists angry, not a stitch of clothing on her stretched tired body.

I found my voice, ‘She dirties herself – easier to keep clean. I dress her in the day – don't leave her like this all the time. It's only me looking after her.'

Myrna held her arms out to me and I knelt and put my head against a jutting collarbone, no soft remained. Myrna spoke and softened the cold grey light of morning.

‘I went in my dream to the place where you were sleeping. Then Noreen came for me every night and shook me awake, wearing that hat. She showed me a place where we can go. A place by the sea and away from people. These bones want to go nowhere quickly. They talk to one another as I walk. They say: “Stop, Myrna, stop walking.” I told them, Sive, I said, “One last time.”'

*   *   *

In Sergio's Café Lulu just nodded when we made our final goodbyes. Fanny stood on ceremony more, asking for our address and putting it in a special compartment of her purse.

The bus to the station took us up the long stretch of road, past theatres, offices, flats and homes all within walking distance of my life but I had never entered this world. Past the people who lived in this other world we were carried, who did not know the contents of mine, or those like me. I was nineteen and it was as if my whole life had been lived.

So I felt no regret or loss when our train pulled out of the station and heaved its way out of the grey vastness into greener times.

Nor did my mother who had her eyes trained on home. The way home cost thirty pounds. I paid for it.

*   *   *

The ship's blast took my throat. We marched up the gangway with hundreds of excited voices, ours silent among them. Myrna and I sat Carmel by a window and not once did she move from it, not once did she take her eyes off the harbour or the rolling sea which followed.

The movement of the ship took my stomach by surprise and I felt it would not settle unless I went above to the deck.

‘On you go, Sive, I'll mind her,' Myrna said.

So I left my mother, I had to have the wind on my face.

The day was cold and bright and the wind sharp with it. I had no jumper and was all goosebumped flesh. My heart stayed warm. I saw the first island off the new shore and I was filled with the sense of knowing it. Voices raised, the ship's blast said: ‘I am bringing them all home!'

Shouts and cries as people on deck recognized waiting faces on the pier, a rushed clearing of the deck that left me standing alone and waiting for someone I would recognize.

There was no one, but the town spires and the faraway hills said, ‘We welcome you back.'

The seagulls added their cries of homecoming.

Below, I found a different mother with the same old woman. Carmel's face had come alive and flushed. She was in her place and knew it.

Myrna smiled at us both and our feverish talk of what way we could make for home.

‘The train to town, Sive,' Carmel was saying. ‘Then the bus. Then home.'

*   *   *

We arrive in the town of Scarna at dead of night, with nothing but emptiness to greet us. The old tired woman and the young lost one look to the one between them, the middle one knows the way.

Carmel left Scarna from the same spot to which she has now returned. She comes off the bus on to ghost footprints, which are her own. Her steps are strong and sure. We leave the town quickly, out into the blackness, and I am afraid. All is familiar about this night to only one of us. All is the same as it was before the path broke up around her. The night greets her like a purring cat, wrapping itself around her.

Carmel bends to unstrap the shoes that have bound her. Her feet released, they carry us over ground known to them. Myrna cannot keep up and I am afraid to be led. Afraid of choking silence and the stray pairs of eyes belonging to the night creatures and spirits who line the way, belonging to the hedgerows and high trees which line the way. All the eyes have come to mark the return.

Myrna and I trail further behind, hold hands and strain to retain sight of the pale legs slicing through the night way. And for us the walk is a forever walk, to us it will not be kind, because we are strangers to the place and the pitch black of the unlit night. We have the smell of city and its disregard on us, we are not open to the ways of the country. Not like Carmel. This is her own. None can take it away. Her pale legs ahead disappear from view and we have to follow up an overgrown laneway with brambles which screech and throw misshapes into the sky and scrape at bare skin. I am afraid of these and Myrna sighs and takes my arm. ‘They will know you, too.'

Where is the way leading?

Upwards and upwards and the shape of a stone house appears when the full moon changes mood, casts off her cloud shrouds and chooses finally to shine and her white light bathes the path and the prospect for us.

Myrna reaches for my hand and says, ‘The house that Noreen brought me to. This is the shape of coming things.'

Where is the way leading?

Up to that stone house surrounded by ghostly trees.

There is an open door and Carmel is there, before it, breathing fast and remembering the last time she walked through it and she says, ‘I cannot go in. I cannot go in.'

And her sweat-glistened face is cased silver in the moonlight and out of the shadows the ghost of Noreen appears and beckons her. She follows then and we follow Carmel and that is how we find the place called home.

A place with no lock on the door, but our presence is marked as an intrusion by the creatures that have made it theirs in our absence. They do not flee when Myrna whispers, ‘Stay.'

The ghost of Noreen leaves us.

Carmel knows the way things are to be done. Myrna and I sit while my mother makes light in the darkness with that which she has always sought to make. By the fireplace the crib is waiting. She runs her fingers along it, removing the dust of years with fresh tears.

‘Were you kept in it?' I ask. She shakes her head. Myrna tells her it is beautiful and Carmel knows that it is.

A fire of welcome is lit for us.

Home.

*   *   *

The new place crept up on us and gave us its heart. Though in the first few days of being there I did not want it.

Noreen had sold all but a few acres. The sold land was farmed still, so curious neighbours did not surround us. The house was whitewashed once and grey patches invited by the salt-laden winds peered through the white. Because the building is on a slight incline, though trees conceal it, the gales laugh at all attempts to shelter the house.

We learned, when a north-easterly blew, to stuff the windows at the front of the house with newspaper and still they rattled and the wind let out shrill whistles of derision. When the weather brought rain to visit the newspaper would soak and drip and the puddles needed mopping up every half hour.

Hoar Rock was once home to a well-made farmer who could afford the view of the harbour at the far end of the grey crescent of rocky shoreline. The house was built at a time when many dwellings huddled away from the elements. Hoar Rock courted them and its first prosperous owners had the means to run fires all year. In the leaner times, when the good land had been sold, Joseph Moriarty was left to farm the rocky fields more sand than earth. The fires were lit only for a few hours on the coldest days and the Hoar Rock house contained a chill that was present even at the height of summer.

This was the house we had come to, and the house, glad to be occupied by the living, whose voices hindered the tormented calls of the dead, asked for the sun to shine on us for the first morning. So when we looked out of our windows we saw the trawlers fishing a glassy sea, a smoothed and polished sea, a rare jewel in the depths of winter. We saw the colourful fronts of the harbour buildings and heard the seagull cries and seal barks carried to us along the shoreline from the harbour three miles away, so still was the air.

‘A day for shirtsleeves,' Myrna said, and I could answer the cheer with a smile because the sharp nature of the fresh air had brought life to my city-dulled lungs. We pulled chairs outside and had our mugs of tea watching the new world.

Afterwards I went to the barn at the side of the house to find what was left in the way of furniture. What was left was home to families of mice who did not take kindly to being disturbed. Two stray cats came from nowhere, like striped shadows. They pounced on the newly exposed nests and carried away the hairless babies. I tried to stop them, but they moved quicker than I will ever learn to. Behind the barn were the remains of Noreen's chicken run and an overgrown track led to a patch of garden, which Noreen had tried to tend to bring some beauty to Hoar Rock on its ugliest days. A few resilient wallflowers had taken over whatever else had been cultivated but now, in winter, these had died back leaving withered evidence of their intentions.

How could anything have grown here?

The sun faded in the mid-morning and I went inside with Myrna. When I saw what had to be done, it was all I could do not to go back to where we had come from. Spots of rain hit the corrugated roof, painted red. The spots told me that when rain fell you would hear little else in the house.

Carmel was nowhere to be found. I thought to look for her, then realized this was her place. She would find me.

There were eyes waiting in the town. The bank was happy to take my English money as most people in the town were going in the direction from which I had come. When I left the bank I had a handful of strange notes between nothing and us.

In the shop the woman put my change on the counter – afraid to touch my skin. On the corner a group of boys-near-men was listening to a transistor, their fingers curled around the last drags of a cigarette or stuffed in their pockets with small change that could take them nowhere.

‘Phil Lynott's sister, lads, it is!' one said, and the others shouldered and cawked, eyes on me then, in the manner I knew men to look.

Later, women with shopping bags full of idle speculation would hear from each other, at Mass, that Carmel Moriarty had come home, with an old woman and a dark woman. We were to remain outside.

*   *   *

In the soft woodland of before morning a woman walked a path familiar. Her tender feet pinched by branches, her walk not as sure as it had once been.

In the soft woodland of morning a middle-aged man took the stroll that was part of his bachelor's ritual, part of a day that was the same as any other. He had places of pilgrimage.

It was not surprising to him to find the object of prayers under a dark tree, her back to him, hunched over, nursing her ribbon-cut feet. Her wild hair carpeting her back, not vibrant, as it had once been, duller with strands of silver. But the same hair and form.

He was convinced he imagined her. His imaginings were more real now than the day in which he lived, worked, ate and slept.

He sat with her and she did not move, so he knew he had gone a little more mad and sorrowful to have aged her so, even in his fantasies. But she was real – when she turned her face towards him she had the lines and marks of the years that had come between them. Her eyes no longer glistening, her eyes faded. A face familiar, yet strange and weathered as his own was.

He put his arms around her and his Carmel had grown cold, as if she had risen from the bottom of a grave or a sea and he was sure that it must have been one or the other, and he was all at once grateful and afraid.

He was fearful for the story behind the lines and marks and fading, what must it tell and would he be made to hear it?