Tomas’s days at university were cut short, too. When I dropped him off, in 1976, there were students out along the footpaths with their Martin Luther King posters and Miriam Makeba T-shirts. Eight years since the Troubles began and they were still singing:
We shall overcome
. Tomas drifted among them. A hopeful shine in his eyes. He wore his hair curly and his bell-bottoms wide. He was once part of a student occupation where they took over the arts building and they were foolish enough to release white doves out the window. He grew quieter as the days went on. Put his head in his maths books. He never quite had both oars in the water, but he thought he might become an actuary. The length of lives, the probability of survival. No formula for our ironies. What was it like, that dark morning, when a couple of
masked men parted the bushes? What small tremor came upon him when he clutched a bullet to his stomach?
I quit the university grounds and brought Georgie back to the car. She laid her head in my lap as I drove. The small comforts.
When I got home to the island there was another letter from the bank. From the ponderous imagination of Simon Leogue. Simon says, You’re broke. Simon says, Pay up. Simon says, Sell or else. Simon says: Now.
Now
.
How was it I had mortgaged and remortgaged everything that had gone before me? From the lough I looked back at the house and the whole kitchen pulsed red, then dark, then red again. I felt that I had passed across to a shore where I did not truly live, but then it struck me it was only the answering machine on the kitchen sideboard. I had thought for a while about blackening it out with a piece of paper and stripping it bare only when I wanted to.
Please leave a message at the tone
. I swam for a half hour, then walked up the garden, toweled Georgie, got dressed, put the kettle on, waited for it to whistle. I had a fair idea that the message was the bank calling once more, but a red light is a red light.
As it turned out, it was Jack’s professor friend, David Manyaki, who said that he was intrigued by the idea of a letter that might pertain to Douglass and that if I ever made it to Dublin he would be delighted to buy me lunch.
An African accent. He sounded older, accomplished, careful. Some Harris Tweed in the voice.
EARLY MORNING SHELLS
fell from the sky, bouncing on the slate roof. The gulls up there, small ziggurats across the expanse. I walked out into the dew. A couple of stray mussels lay open-shelled in the grass. It was Debussy who said that the music is what is contained
between the notes. It was a relief to be home, and my energy had returned despite my bedraggled sleep. I took the pile of bills and burnt them in the fireplace.
In the living room near the fire, some of my mother’s old watercolors hung. In her later years, she took up painting as her interest in photography waned. She thought the new machinery took the joy out of the work. She liked to sit in the sunroom and paint: there is one of the cottage itself, the blue half-door open and the lough stretching endlessly behind it.
I sat in the kitchen listening to the radio while a ten-force blew in. The wind began hammering across the lough. Within an hour, huge waves were breaking hard against the seawall. The rain came up the garden and whacked the windowpanes and the storm put its shoulder to the lough.
David Manyaki. An odd name. He would be a widower with an Achebe face perhaps. A ledge of gray hair. A deep brow. A serious stare. Or perhaps he was a white man with an African accent. Silver spectacles and charm. With leather patches on the elbows of his jacket.
I wondered if I should BlackBerry him or Google him or whatever the phrase may be, but my mobile phone was cut off, no signal.
WHEN I EXCAVATE
my childhood it is always the journey to the cottage from the Malone Road that I like the most. Sitting in the car with my mother and father. We remember paths as much as we remember people. I wanted to retrace some of the miles for old times’ sake. I looped north to Newtownards, then east through Greyabbey and south by Kircubbin, all the way along the loughshore.
There is a beautiful slant to the ancient ferryboat at Portaferry. I queued on the eastern shore and watched the boat come across. Churning a thin line of white. About a dozen cars on deck, the sun
shining on their windscreens. A few children on the upper level, looking out over the channel for porpoises breaking the water. The journey across the Narrows is only a few hundred yards, but the boat has to attack the channel at an angle, depending on the strength and direction of the tide. For four hundred years it has gone back and forth. In the distance, the mountains lay purple against the sky. Perhaps they were called the Mournes for another reason: in the face of such beauty it always shocks me that we blew ourselves asunder for so many years.
The ferry negotiated the current, slid into dock. I drove the Land Rover on, rolled down the window, paid the tall young ferryman. He didn’t look like the sort of young man who would understand a quip about the Styx. Still, he was good-humored and smiling. For a moment all sense, even memory, of land disappeared. I put on the handbrake, closed the car door, brought Georgie to the upper deck for a breath of fresh air.
At the far end, a young couple snuggled into each other, speaking Russian. Perhaps a honeymoon. I tugged on Georgie’s leash and wandered along to where a family from Portavogie were breaking out sandwiches and a flask of hot tea. Two parents, six kids. They offered Georgie bits and pieces of their sandwiches, rubbed her neck. They were on their way down south, they said, for the Queen’s visit. I had been out of the loop, away from what the world thinks of itself. I had neglected the newspaper for many months. No television. My radio was permanently tuned to the classical station.
“The Queen herself,” said the young mother, clearly beaming, as if there might be multiple copies of the monarchy. Her tongue was loose with a little lager. She said with a sniff that President Obama was coming, too, in the exact same week. Strange collisions. It hardly mattered: all I had to do was sell my letter.
The ferry bumped up against the far shore. Gulls wheeled above us. I bid the family good day and shunted Georgie back into the car.
I skirted around the coast road. To hell with the cost of diesel. A large queue of cars gathered impatiently behind me. They overtook, flashing their headlights. One even stopped in the middle of the road, got out of his car, and said: “Fuck you, you stupid old cow,” and I thanked him for his remarkable eloquence. I inquired if he, too, was on his way to see the Queen. A footman’s humor. He didn’t laugh.
There was no avoiding the busy road. Large trucks bore up behind. I was going so fast that the steering wheel shook in my hands. A rigid pain in both my shoulders. I passed the border without even knowing it and when I stopped at the first petrol station I could find, I recalled that I needed to get euros. The clerk, a young Asian gentlemen, directed me towards the bank machine. A moment of freeze. What message would come up on the screen? How do you explain, at seventy-two years of age, such a stranded life?
The screen flickered an instant, but out came the small sheaf of money, the little rollers of joy.
I bought Georgie a celebratory sausage roll. I thought about splurging on a packet of cigarettes, a habit from the old days, but decided against it. We inched out onto the old road with a full tank of diesel.
I switched on the radio in the car. All the talk was of security and the Queen’s visit. They didn’t seem so worried about a bullet for Obama. Our complex histories. Inner colonialism indeed. I switched the station. The traffic deepened the farther south I got. It had already taken me four hours from Belfast, largely to do with Georgie’s bladder control. Every twenty miles or so I had to pull the car to the side in order to let her relieve herself. She wasn’t too fond of the journey and kept whimpering in the backseat until I finally allowed her to sit up front with her head out the passenger-side window.
It was early evening by the time I reached the outskirts of the city. I dawdled along, cursing myself for having booked a hotel in the city
center. It would have been far easier to find a place on the outskirts. Dublin so much like anywhere else. Swerving flyovers. Shopping centers. Streets pepper-sprayed with
For Sale
signs.
Closing Down. Liquidity Blowout
. Empty glass towers. The repetitive strain of what we have all become. The vain show. The status hunger. I took advantage of the bus lanes and made my way along Gardiner Street. A Guard tried to flag me but I just kept going, waggling my northern license plate like a young girl parading herself along. I wanted to walk across the Beckett Bridge just for the sheer irony of it,
No matter, try again, fail again, fail better
, but got caught up in a vicious series of one-way junctions and traffic roadblocks for the state visits.
It was almost eight o’clock in the evening when I finally pulled up outside the Shelbourne, an expensive treat for myself. The valet, a vile little Spanish snob, looked at the car and then at me with more disdain than I can possibly describe, and then I was curtly told that there were no dogs allowed. Of course not. I had to admit to myself that I had known it all along. No point fooling any longer. Not much beyond a snob myself, of course. I feigned outrage and indignation, then promptly got snarled in the traffic again. The truth was I had hardly any money left at all, certainly not for the luxury of a hotel.
Georgie and I slept in the car park by the beach out at Sandymount. Four other vehicles alongside me. Homeless families, I presumed. There was the vacant thought of how ordinary my own problems were. The families were sandwiched tight in their cars. Blankets and hats pulled up around them. All their possessions piled high on the roof, strapped down with rope. They looked like figures from some of my mother’s earliest black-and-white photographs. We seem to have a touching conviction that these things will never happen in our own territory. As if nothing of the past can happen in the present. The Grapes of Wrath. One of the cars even had a bumper sticker:
Celtic Tiger, My Arse
. The Guards paid us a visit in the middle
of the night, shone a torch in the window, but allowed us be. I pulled my coat high and huddled into the seat. A chill knifed through the gap in the door. I pulled Georgie into my lap to warm me, but she lost her bladder twice, poor thing.
In the morning the children from the neighboring car were staring in the window. To distract them while I changed, I asked them to take Georgie for a run along the strand. I slipped them a two-euro coin. Still, one of the little monsters said: “She smells.” Frankly, I didn’t know if she meant me or the dog. A surge of grief in my stomach. The children looked relieved to get away from me. I watched the imprint of their feet in the soft sand dissolve. An enormous stretch of gray towards the green of the headlands.
Later I walked with Georgie to Irishtown for breakfast and found a café where they allowed her to doze at my feet. I washed my coat out in the sink, dabbed my dress clean, stared at myself in the mirror. I combed my hair and put on a line of lipstick. Small matters, ancient pride.
The radio warned of more huge traffic jams. I left the car at the beach and took a taxi, which tried looping its way around towards the area of Smithfield. The driver was a local. “Keep the dog at your feet for fucksake,” he said. A roll of fat twisted at the back of his neck.
We hit more traffic and found ourselves snared. He cursed the Queen with remarkable dexterity. I had to get out and walk the last quarter mile. The driver asked for a tip.
Throwaway
, I thought, but before I could say anything he cursed and sped off.
Smithfield was a shabby little area of the city that didn’t fit my perception of what it might have been, but then again neither did David Manyaki who was waiting for me on the street corner.
I had expected an older man, formal, gray-haired, leather patches on the sleeves of his jacket. With silver spectacles and a gravelly manner. Perhaps he would wear one of those small African hats, I could
not for the life of me remember the name of them, small and boxy and colorful. Or maybe he would look more like those tall Nigerian businessmen in their shiny blue suits and tight white shirts and baleful little bellies?
Manyaki was in his early thirties. An elegant jumble sale. He was wide of chest, muscled, with a slight touch of flab about him. His hair was in loose cornrows, but fell into short tubes that swung down to his jaw—I tried to remember the word for the style, but couldn’t, my mind wasn’t catching. He wore a rumpled sports jacket, but underneath it was a colorful dashiki, yellow with threaded silver. He shook my hand. I felt heavy and frumpy, but there was something about Manyaki that sprinkled a line of salt along my spine. He reached for Georgie and petted her. His accent was more deeply African than it had been on the phone, though there was a lilt of Oxford to it.
“Dreadlocks,” I said to him, rather ridiculously.
He laughed.
We entered a dank little café. The owners had set up a small television on the counter where they were watching the events of the day unfold: the Queen was on her way to the Garden of Remembrance. There were scattered protests in the streets. No riot guns, no rubber bullets, no CS gas. The TV commentators were interested in the notion that she had landed in a green dress. I have never been much for monarchy, and although I grew up nominally Protestant, an ancient part of me still aligned itself with Lily Duggan.
We ordered coffee. The television droned in the background.
When I showed Manyaki the letter, he held the plastic at the very edge and turned it around in his fingers. I explained to him that it was written on behalf of my great-grandmother who had worked as a young girl in the house on this very street, Brunswick, but he corrected me immediately and said that Douglass had stayed on Great Brunswick, which was now renamed Pearse Street.
“I was wondering why you wanted to meet here,” he said.
“This is not Great Brunswick?”