by Sarah Tolmie
* * *
Now, Dirty Nellie understood many words but she didn’t think in them. She watched the shapes of words on people’s mouths and applied them to certain objects and situations, but in the main she got on quite well without them. A lot of what people said made no sense. Often they talked to pass the time, and time did not pass in that way for her. Generally, she preferred to be alone. After she had performed a certain act with Thomas Derrane at the age of thirteen or so, other men of the village began to come to her. She performed this act with them, too, using the parts of her body accommodated to such things. All other parts of her body had their uses. Legs for kicking and running and arms for swinging and hands for grabbing and so on. So, it seemed pretty straightforward. It wasn’t always convenient but usually they brought food. Sometimes, they would share it with her, but more often, they left it. Sometimes, they brought clothing, cast-offs from their mothers and sisters. Or maybe they stole it. She once had a man’s angry wife snatch a warm cap off her head as she passed through the village. After that, she always wore anything she was given that way far down inside any other clothes she was wearing so it couldn’t be seen. It was safer.
She knew few women and liked none of them except for old Aoife. She begged in front of the houses of some of them when she had to. She did this by standing, or sometimes kneeling, with her hands clasped, within sight of their front windows, usually on a Sunday after church. Sometimes, she did this for a long time. But almost always, the woman of the house would come out and give her eggs or bread or some cooked meat or fish. Most of her winter clothing came to her in this way also. But she still did not trust them. Only old Aoife, who never gave her anything but allowed her to sleep by the hearth whenever she wanted, which she did quite often in winter. She would share her kills—hares, pheasants, mice—with Aoife sometimes and never stole her fowls. Any other chicken or duck she would kill if she found it unsupervised, but this was rare.
For a woman who lived on a small island, she spent very little time by the sea. She hated and feared it. She hated its constant, unpredictable motion. It was always leaping and creeping up on her. She could never take her eyes off it and this was very tiring. She noticed that others spent time by the sea and got food from its margins—seaweed, shelled creatures from the rocks—but she never tried, not even when she was starving. She was afraid of the ocean’s endlessly reaching silent hands that would seize and drown her. Other people had some other resource, that sense that they all shared, the one that made the movements of their mouths meaningful to them, that offered them some protection from the sea. All those people who knew when a dog barked away behind them, they were safe. On land, she could tell when a dog, or a man, or another animal came near or went away. She could smell it. She could feel it in the ground. But the vile sea is always thrashing and its stink is constant. She kept right away from it.
This was her life until the pain began. Aoife thought that she might be with child. The pain came from deep inside her. But she did not grow and though the pains went on for months, no child came. Aoife fed her many smelly herbs. Sometimes, the pain would stop for a while but never for long. By the time of the old woman’s death, she was in constant agony. She wept and wept over the still body of Aoife by the hearth because the old woman was gone and she had loved her, and because she herself, Nellie, was still there. Death looked so restful.
After Aoife died, meaning no disrespect, she took the fisherman’s sweater that the old woman had cherished. It was precious and many women had come to talk to Aoife about it. What they talked about on these occasions, Aoife had never been able to make clear to her. A number of words that she had never seen on the mouths of anyone were involved. Aoife would get excited trying to explain it. Her eyes would glisten. In the end, though, what Nellie knew was only that the sweater was different. It did not come from the village.
Nellie did not care. The fine, heavy wool was warm. The heat it made on her body dulled the pain. She stood up in it at Aoife’s door and faced down the villagers when they came, all the angry women, even the priest. They went away, leaving the cottage unburnt. By then, Nellie herself was burning, burning and shivering by turns. The sweater became her only solace. She lay in it, hour after hour, not eating, not drinking, not sleeping, just being in pain. Pain is widely spoken of but it is impossible to convey how terrible it is. The sensation of the wool on her skin, its smell, its heat, its scratchiness, became the only things she had, other than the pain. Those things, and the pattern on the front panels. It lay over her chest and belly and groin, and she looked down at it constantly, like reading a book upside-down. Nellie could not read but she had seen Father Anselma’s Bible. She had even held it in her hands for a blessing once when she was a young child. The priest had come and he and her parents, who never agreed about anything, had prayed fervently together. He never came again. Yet Nellie remembered this about the letters in a book: they looked sharply different upside-down or right-side-up. She thought of this, or felt this, as her fingers traced out the pattern again and again: the ball, the rope, the grass, the cow’s hoof. How she was herself a book now, a white page. She saw the markings on the page one way; anyone looking at her would see it another. Which was right? The ball, the rope, the grass, the cow’s hoof: the cow’s hoof, the grass, the rope, the ball. Pain spread throughout her. It was her. Pain beheld her with another face. The ball, the rope, the grass, the cow’s hoof; the hoof, the grass, the rope . . .
The door.
* * *
Jim Conneely ran aground on an island that wasn’t there. Due north of Inis Mór, as far as he could reckon. When he spun around, confused, on the strand, he could see the north shore. Conneely was an impossible man and he had found an impossible island. Well, isn’t that just the way, now? he thought, and shrugged, and sighed.
Seconds before, he had despaired of his life. There had been a squall. His currach had been carried rapidly towards the mouth of the bay. Much as he struggled against it, his tiny boat was rushing towards the open sea. His bones would wash up, years from now, on the coast of Newfoundland. It was all over. Of course, he had furled his wee sail at the first gusts of unmanageable wind. The monstrous idiocy of having a sail in a boat as small as this had struck him forcibly. He had bailed and bailed with his soft skin bag, the only thing you can bail a currach with without breaking its fragile skin. He had given up trying to impose any will on the thing at all. The tiny fat boat swung round and round on the waves in a final, fatal reel with the sea. Jim Conneely hated dancing. It was one of those innumerable things people did to pass the time that made no sense to him at all. To die this way was infuriating, but, clearly, die he must. Praying was out of the question. When had it ever done him, or anybody, any good at all? At the same time, there was no way he was resigned. Resignation was not for Jim Conneely. It was a pointless state of being. To resign meant to give something up in favour of something else, or at the will of someone else. To be resigned was always to be resigned to. He refused flatly to be resigned to anything or anybody. God. Death. None of it had anything to do with him. He was his own master.
The one thing he had never been able to master was the strange art of being Jim Conneely. But that was the challenge, though, wasn’t it? Otherwise, he was one of those talented men to whom everything came easily. So, he had spent a lot of his time making things difficult for himself. The problem in this life, he thought, as the boat whirled sickeningly faster and faster as if on a potter’s wheel, is that nobody ever leaves you alone. It just seems incredible to them that you don’t want to master them, or be mastered by them, or whatever it is, that you might just want to confine yourself to governing what went on in your own head. Half the time, his head felt like a creel too full of fish, and wasn’t it like that for everybody?
So, his thoughts spun on and on. The boat spun on and on. It was ridiculous. He could fill a whole prayer book with his thoughts from just these few minutes. You’d think he’d be a bit busier when dying. His mind w
as just readying itself to go off on some other tangent when, right through the skin of the boat, he felt land under his foot in its thin pampootie. And that was impossible, as he’d been lost in deep ocean a second before. The boat bobbed and stopped whirling. He was in that situation that it is only possible to be in while in a currach, that of being on land and water at the same time. He felt rock under his feet stretched out before him while his buttocks bounced lightly on rolling waves. A currach is a mad sort of boat. He was a mad sort of man. There was nothing to do but get out of the boat. So he did.
* * *
Every person who has ever lived in Ireland has heard of Oliver Cromwell. Even the gods have heard of him by now. Insofar as the Arans are part of Ireland, always a matter for debate—for either they are islands entire of themselves, or they are the quintessence of Irishness, unless perhaps the two are the same—the people here, too, retain a deep and scarred memory of that terrible man. He and his army crossed Inis Mór in 1650. He incarcerated many priests on Inis Oírr, and you can still hear their ghostly orisons when the wind is easterly. So, it will surprise nobody that Cromwell left his mark even on Inis Caillte, the fourth Aran island, the lost one.
Thus, the first person that Jim Conneely met on Inis Caillte was a camp follower from Cromwell’s army. Of all kinds of human being that it is possible to be, a Cromwellian camp follower is one of the worst. Sex and Puritanism are hard companions. The Wars of the Three Kingdoms were hard on all of the men in all of the armies, but let it be said now that they were even harder on the women. It must be reckoned to Jim Conneely’s credit that he perceived this almost at once.
The first that he noticed of Meg Haylock was her scarred hand on his gunwale, pulling the currach gingerly in to shore. She had been cut by a sword and was missing her little finger. When he looked up at her face, he saw it was heavily scarred by what he thought must have been the pox, though it turned out to be the bubonic plague.
“Hup,” she said to him with a quick jerk of her head, indicating the rocky beach. He hopped out of the boat and collapsed as his frozen knees gave way. He crawled forward and helped her heave the currach gently over the rocks. It was so astonishing that the hide wasn’t ripped to shreds already that it seemed a shame to tear it now. The two of them got the little craft above the water line.
“Who are you?” he asked when he got his breath back.
“Meg Haylock,” she said. Her voice was deep and burry.
“Where do you come from?”
“Huntingdon.”
“And where’s that?”
“Near Cambridge.”
“You don’t mean to tell me that this is England?”
“No,” said Meg, “this isn’t England.” As it happens, she was speaking English, a language that Jim did not know. He only worked that out later. But the first rule is that all of the lost can understand each other. It’s an admirable rule.
“How did you end up here? Do you know?” asked Jim.
“One minute, I was being crushed into the mud by fleeing men, and then I was here,” replied Meg.
“And how did you feel?” asked Jim, as this seemed important.
“Then? Sick. And angry. Scared. After that, just surprised. I’ve been surprised ever since I got here.”
“And when was that?”
“I don’t rightly know. I should say maybe a couple of months. My wounds healed.”
“You said men were fleeing? Was there an army? What army?”
“The army of the Parliament. Ironsides. I was with my brother, and his friend, my betrothed before he died. They were infantry. I started out a washerwoman.”
“I ought to kill you,” said Jim Conneely.
“I don’t know that it works that way here,” said Meg.
“What, we’re in heaven, then, are we?” said Jim, acidly.
“There’s no such thing as heaven,” replied Meg.
“Well, that’s one thing we can agree on, anyway,” said Jim.
* * *
When Nellie arrived on Inis Caillte through the blazing door of her own pain, the first thing she met was the sea. Nor was she pleased to do so. She lay on a patch of damp grass close to a rocky shore. While her insides were no longer burning, she was instantly and thoroughly uncomfortable. All around her, and going right through her head like a knife, was a great whooshing, thundering roar. It was horrible and vast and got right inside her. She sat up. The grass stems made a kind of squeaking rustle. They seemed alive. It was terrible. She shrank away from them. The rushing and sighing of the air by her ears, in her ears, went on and on. A cricket hopped and made a nasty clicking noise. Noise. That’s what it all was. Of course, it’s completely stupid to describe it in this way, as Nellie did not have words for roar, rustle, click or noise. She could not match them with any sensations. But this was trivia. Much worse was that she could not match the sensations she was now having, which were those of hearing, with the ones she was used to. With seeing and feeling and smelling and understanding where her limbs were in space. Hearing, if you must do it for the first time, is positively deafening. After five more minutes of it, she had to roll over and vomit. She sat trembling for fifteen more minutes before she could get up or move around. When she did, she got dreadful vertigo every time she looked at the sea beating and beating against the shore. It called attention to itself like a crying baby or a needy drunk, endlessly. She shaped her lips into a word she had seen on Aoife’s mouth, and others.’ Loud.
Fortunately, she breathed it only and made no sound. She was spared the further shock of listening to her own voice, as untrained as that of a wild animal.
So, Nellie was unusual in that the first human voice she heard was not her own.
* * *
The second person Jim Conneely met on Inis Caillte was Mary MacIntosh, the girl he was going to marry. He wouldn’t have called himself a marrying man at the time.
He and Meg Haylock were proceeding inland across a field of sheep, quite companionably. Jim felt on the one hand that he was in duty bound to throttle her as an enemy of his people, and on the other an equally strong resistance to doing anything that duty bound him to do. As Meg was big and strong and pretty well as tall as he was, and quite unperturbed by their uncanny situation, he figured that the sensible thing was to go along with her in case he needed an ally. She had helped him out with the currach.
There was an uncommonly pretty girl watching over the sheep. “Ah, Mary,” said Meg, coming up to her, “Look, here’s another one. His name is Jim.”
“Jim Conneely,” he said, and wished he had a cap to remove with a flourish. Unfortunately, his cap had been the first victim of the squall that had brought him there. There was no cap in history that would have made it through such a gale, not even one belonging to Hannibal.
“Are you a Conneely from Inis Mór, then?” said the pretty girl, Mary.
Jim was thunderstruck. “Yes!” he said. “Yes, I am! It seems to me that it’s just over there, no more than a mile south. Is that true? How can that be?” And then he added, “And you, Miss MacIntosh, are you from around here?”
“It’s true it’s no more than mile. Still, it’s very hard to get to. Half the time, we can’t even see it. And I myself”—she smiled gaily, showing a dimple on one side—“am a native of this place, Inis Caillte. These are my father’s sheep. Our farm is just over the hill.”
“So, there are people from here, born here?” asked Jim, eagerly. “It’s not just that lost people wash up here?”
“Oh, no,” said Mary, “It’s the whole island that’s lost. We’ve been on it a long time. As long as you on the other islands, I expect. You know how it is on an island. We’re independent. But there’s something about this island that attracts the lost. Like a lodestone. They’re drawn here. They pop up from time to time.”
“From anywhere?”
“So it would seem. My father once met an Afric prince.”
“But Meg here is from the from the seventeenth century!
From the time of the Cromwellian wars! That’s two hundred years ago! And she’s been here only a few months.”
“Yes,” said Mary, “it works like that.”
“What year is it, anno domini? Here?”
“1840,” said Mary. “Why, what is it where you come from?”
“1840,” said Jim, relieved. He didn’t want to live through the Middle Ages. “How’s the fishing?” he said.
* * *
Meg Haylock came from the same village as Cromwell himself, the great general. The Lord Protector. She and her brother got some credit for this. Cromwell had been their member of Parliament, though of course their family were not of the class who could vote. They were good Puritans, though, dissatisfied with Anglican compromise and with a healthy hatred for the foreign and Catholic-loving king. There had been a party with a bonfire in Huntingdon at the news of Charles’s execution. Ah, the Parliament was bringing a new day!
Of course, this new day couldn’t dawn until they had mopped up the king’s Catholic allies, many of whom were in Ireland, another foreign nation. And while the Haylocks, as yeomen, couldn’t vote, they were perfectly acceptable to the Parliamentary army. Meg’s brother joined and was given a pike and a helm and some plated leather armour and some infantry drill. And a wage. Meg joined too and was given none of these things. That is, she went along with her brother and his friend Christopher, to whom she had become engaged at the bonfire party, as they departed the fens, first for London and then for Dublin. Their parents were dead and their farm had been first mortgaged and then destroyed in the fighting that swirled over East Anglia in the early years of the civil wars. Even the New-Modelled Army needed women. Armies needed cooking and cleaning and carrying and comfort; everybody knew that. She wasn’t the only local woman to go. None came back.
