The River Capture

by Mary Costello

  Also by Mary Costello

  Academy Street

  The China Factory

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  canongate.co.uk

  This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Mary Costello, 2019

  The right of Mary Costello to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  Excerpt from ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’, Words & Music by Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr © Copyright 1987 Universal International Music Publishing B.V. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission by Hal Leonard Europe Limited. Excerpt from ‘Mythistorema’ in Complete Poems by Giorgos Seferis, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (2018). Reproduced with permission of Carcanet Press Limited. Excerpt from With Borges by Alberto Manguel (Westbourne Publishers Limited). Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear. Excerpt from The Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee (2016). Republished with permission of Princeton University Press; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Centre, Inc. Excerpt from The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson © 1951. Reproduced with permission. Excerpt from ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ from New Collected Poems by Derek Mahon. Reproduced by kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland.

  This is a work of fiction. It is not based on real events, people or places. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is entirely coincidental.

  The River Capture received financial assistance from the Arts Council of Ireland

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78211 643 1

  eISBN 978 1 78211 644 8

  For

  Martin

  ‘In theory, there is a gravitational attraction between every drop of sea water and even the outermost star of the universe.’

  Rachel Carson

  Contents

  BAREFOOT, LUKE O’BRIEN …

  MID-MORNING, HE IS …

  THE CHURCH BELLS …

  FROM THE KITCHEN …

  IN THE EVENING …

  RUTH CALLS HIM …

  THE OLD PALL …

  ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON, …

  ‘DID YOU KNOW?’ …

  HE SEES HIMSELF, …

  AS HE TURNS …

  YESTERDAY I SAW …

  BAREFOOT, LUKE O’BRIEN descends the stairs of Ardboe House and stands at the window on the return landing. All Waterford around him: fertile fields, ancient oak forests, a great river plain, a castle three miles away with other ancestral houses spread out like satellites around it, and, less than a quarter of a mile away as the crow flies, the bend in the Sullane river and on its far bank the town of Clonduff.

  A fine morning. Lynch’s cattle are spread out in Luke’s fields, calm after last night’s racket. A single cloud approaches the sun. At intervals between the oak and beech trees on the riverbank, water birds skim the surface and the river glints in the sunlight. Before descending the remaining stairs Luke inhales the cool air of the house and waits for the cloud to pass.

  He crosses the hall, deep red carpet underfoot, and opens the front door. The cat darts past and runs ahead of him, tail in the air, down the back hall into the kitchen. Kitten belly on her again, he thinks. You old slut, Lily. He rubs her ears. She meows loudly, snaking between his legs as he opens a tin of cat food. Need to get you spayed, missy, he says.

  In the downstairs bathroom he empties his bladder. Mingo. He wishes he had learned Latin. He’d like to be able to conjugate verbs, recognise instantly the Latin root of a word. He stands before the mirror. Something like the rumble of thunder woke him at 2 a.m. When he looked out, Lynch’s cattle were mounting each other under the full moon. Uncastrated bulls, weighing nearly a ton each, Lynch’s latest enterprise. They thrive far better, he told Luke, and have a higher kill-out percentage at the factory. Last night they were demented. One by one they pawed the ground, lowered their heads and thundered down towards the river.

  He examines his teeth, checks his crown. He’ll be bald before he’s forty, like Dadda. Nothing between me and Heaven, Dadda used to say. Hirsute arms and legs, a bit of grey in his temples. He lathers on shaving foam and begins to shave. The short strokes of the Bic razor rasp against his skin. He once slept with a girl from Rathgar who had white pubic hair, and she only twenty-five. Fernfoils of maidenhair. Was that Stephen or Bloom? More like Bloom, he thinks. Josie went bald down there, but he thinks that was from the chemo. In her final months he used to take her to the toilet, bathe her. His strange, simple-minded aunt. She had more baths and showers in the last six months of her life than she had in the sixty-six years that went before.

  The kitchen sink is piled with dirty dishes, pots and pans, cutlery. He begins to sort them, scraping grease and mould from the saucepans into the bin. Then, frustrated, he gives up. He takes the tea towel from the little rubber suction hook, sniffs it, then tosses it away. He read somewhere that dishcloths are two hundred thousand times dirtier than toilet seats. That couldn’t be right, could it? His eyes are drawn to spots of mould on the grout between the tiles where the tea towel hung. Microbes, colonies of bacteria dividing and multiplying there in the dark under his nose for years. Generations of them. All over the house, miscellaneous colonies of bacteria. Spiders and flies, too, and moths and fleas all going about their business – all the minute, parallel lives this house accommodates.

  He makes coffee, sits at the kitchen table and lights a cigarette. There are books and magazines strewn all over the table. A fly buzzes past his head, around the kitchen, then angles back to the dresser. Lily jumps on his lap, settles down and begins to purr. Her purrs vibrate in his thighs. He strokes her back, thinks of her little organs and entrails, the gestating foetuses. Her eyes grow drowsy. Sunlight streaming in the tall windows makes him drowsy too. His head is tender this morning; he shouldn’t mix grape and grain. Lately he has started to visualise liver damage. The edges get frilly, tattered, discoloured, then the function slows. He is constantly looking for signs in himself – liver eyes, liver skin, pale stools. White specks on the fingernails, a nurse once told him, are the tell-tale signs doctors look for.

  Lynch’s dairy herd are fanned out on the front field beyond the lawn, empty udders swinging loosely. Bulls at the back of the house, cows at the front – he is besieged by Lynch’s beasts. Big Friesian cows, heads down grazing, filling up with milk again. Every morning they move in an eastwardly direction, then curve towards the south, like a great ship turning. Such a meek nature they have. He watches them intently. Not as melancholy as the cows of his childhood. Modern cows might be prone to interference from satellite signals or phone masts or the electronic bleeps and the spectral wavelengths of light-emitting diodes in the milking parlour, all this turbulence entering their consciousness and changing them, corrupting their nature, dulling their sensibilities. Poor, post-industrial cows. He watches them for a long time. The way they lift their tails and simultaneously defecate and urinate and masticate without as much as a how-do-you-do.

  What to do today. He could cut away the furze and briars in the quarry, clear out the junk in the stables, rehang the doors.
There’s no shortage of work. Getting started is the problem. This solitary life is breeding in him a great immobility. Some days, sitting in the same position, he thinks he has been there for a few minutes when, in fact, hours have passed and suddenly it is noon or afternoon or four o’clock and the day outside has entirely changed.

  He could go back to his teaching job in Belvedere. His happiest years, waking up in the little flat in Harold’s Cross with Maeve beside him. Her warm breath and body. Sleepy sex before dawn, the smell and taste of her in his mouth, on his fingers. Standing under the hot shower, dazed, cleansed, then out into the cool morning air. His feet snug inside soft nubuck boots, bought in Clark’s on Grafton Street. One hour it took to cross the city, south to north, down the Harold’s Cross Road, into the little park just as it was opening at 8 a.m., out the other end, past the Hospice for the Dying. Thinking of the poor devils inside, gone to nothing, bones protruding under sheets, morphine pumps ticking away the pain. Unmerciful, he thinks now, not to allow mercy killing. He’d have done it himself to Josie if he could. Walking along, thinking of Maeve in the flat rising sleepily from the bed, showering, dressing, and then he’d be caught off guard by a crosswind coming up the canal on Harold’s Cross Bridge. Below the bridge, Gordon’s fuel yard, the coal and oil trucks lined up, ready for the day. On Clanbrassil Street a plaque on a wall for Leopold Bloom: citizen, husband, father, wanderer. In the imagination was born …

  He puts two eggs on to boil. Husband, father, wanderer. Epithets all. Citizen. Who composes these inscriptions? Some arts officer in Dublin City Council who never as much as opened Ulysses. Confusing Bloom with the citizen! Husband, father, wanderer. What else? Dreamer. Schemer. Sinner. Humanist, feminist, pacifist.

  The fly is back, zigzagging above Lucy’s Irish dancing medals, coated with old grease and grime, on their velvet display. His own gold medal is in a velvet box upstairs. First in maths in the Leaving Cert in 1996. Dadda, in his gentleman farmer’s tweed jacket and waistcoat, drove around the town on the tractor that evening, hooting the horn, a victory lap. First in the whole of Ireland. He was treated as special after that, marked out by destiny. Even before that, he had felt special. His father took him out of primary school on Friday afternoons, and they’d ride the tractor to the old folks’ home up on the hill and dole out oranges and chocolate to the residents. How’re you today, Teresa? Didn’t Pat-Joe play well on Sunday, Dinny? He is, he’s a great boy … My son. In whom I am well … On winter nights Luke and Lucy would lie on the drawing-room floor doing their homework, with Josie knitting by the fire and his mother below in the kitchen, smoking, alone with her thoughts, and his father would enter the room whistling, the smell of cold air off him, and he’d lean down and kiss each one of them on the head. He had come late to marriage and fatherhood. He must have pinched himself sometimes at his good fortune.

  Poor Dadda. He never learned to drive the car. Less than a year after the victory lap, he suffered a sudden, fatal heart attack. No time for goodbye. Three days later Luke walked ahead of his funeral cortege up to the graveyard. He still remembers the sound of his footsteps on the road. Nothing else was audible – not the hum of the hearse’s engine or the breeze in the trees. It had felt like a dream. The light of that May morning, the clear blue sky, the shimmering river. The stillness of everything. And then he flew, like it was the most natural thing in the world. He felt himself rise and hover above the road. Below him, the hearse and the mourners on foot and the cars coming slowly behind them. He could see it all: the road, the bridge, the avenue leading up to their house with no one home and all the rooms with all the furniture and beds and rugs awaiting their return. And the shiny black roof of the hearse glinting in the sun and the coffin inside and his father’s body in a tweed suit and waistcoat supine on a bed of white satin, his beautiful face framed by a fringe of lace. He had never felt closer to him than at that moment. Where are you taking me? his father had asked. Up the road here for a rest, he replied. Are you going to plant me? I am. Will I sprout? You will, next spring. Will I bloom? You will, next summer. Luke felt the touch of his father’s hand on his head ruffling his hair and he heard the beat of his own footsteps on the road again, the sound in tandem with the gentle waves lapping against the riverbank and the whistle of the reeds. And then a flock of little birds swooped down from above and flew on ahead and he heard their song – the authentic music of Eden – and he thought this is what it must feel like to walk into eternity.

  A shaft of sun falls diagonally across the wooden table. He lights another cigarette. He had not been afraid that morning. He had felt his father’s protection. The river, too, navigating him, something alive and benevolent – a little river sprite come to his aid in his hour of need, an imp of reason bringing order. The Imp of the Adverse. He peers at the grain of the wood in the table. The quantum properties of wood. Maybe he should have studied maths or science. A speck of cigarette ash drifts down in the air. He did not have the steam-power to be a mathematician, or a physicist. He frowns in concentration. What is it he is trying to recover? Something that the ray of sun and the grain of the wood and the specks of ash are drawing out. With his index finger he presses an ash speck into the wood, then rubs the remaining ash between finger and thumb, over and back, until it is barely visible among the whorled contours of his fingertips. He stares at his thumb for a while. Strictly speaking, he might have been a little depressed last winter; the short days, the long nights, with only Ellen, his aunt who lives nearby, his regular company. But everything passes, and one evening in February he looked up from his book and saw the sun come through a gap in the trees and he sat in the same place the next evening and again the sun came through, and gradually the days lengthened and before he knew it, it was Easter.

  He places two eggcups on a plate, pops the eggs in and pours a little salt on the side of the plate. Josie used to lick the salt off her plate. Her presence still throngs the house. He had to sell her hens at the market in Cork after she died; he couldn’t bear the sight of them mooching around the yard, pining. Dirty auld things, his mother said, shitting all over the place.

  At the table he pushes away some books to make room for the plate, then tops the eggs. Dadda used to top his and Lucy’s eggs every morning. Something as trivial as topping an egg, no greater love. The yolk spills over and dribbles onto the plate. He adds a pinch of salt to each egg. With the edge of the spoon he shears albumen off the inside of the eggshell and mixes it with the soft yolk. In his mouth his tongue seeks out the solid texture of the albumen, suddenly repulsed by the thought of biting into the embryonic speckle in the yolk. He swallows hard, fearing queasiness. He rinses his palate with a mouthful of coffee and picks a book from the pile at the end of the table. With Borges. Borges’s photo is on the front cover: a beautiful old man with tossed white hair gazing skywards. You’d never guess he was blind. Luke reads a few pages. Every night of his life Borges put on his long wool nightshirt and knelt down and recited the Our Father in English. He had ten names for the sky. He wrote something about angels too. Luke flicks through some pages. Not in this book.

  He closes the book. There are books all over the house. He buys them in charity shops, second-hand bookshops, at auctions. Three for a euro, five for two euros. He collects magazines too – New Scientist, Scientific American, Nature – tempted by a headline: The Ultimate Quantum Paradox, Touching the Multiverse, Cosmic Coincidences, Four Radical Routes to a Theory of Everything, The Maths of Democracy, How Your Mind Warps Time, Why Darwin Was Wrong About the Tree of Life, Why Einstein Was Wrong About Relativity, The Strangest Liquid. Water, the multiverse, the Higgs Boson, the SpaceX project, fast radio bursts, the strangeness and charm of a quark – late at night he feasts on these articles, enthralled by every new finding, the moment amplified by the silence and the lateness of the hour and the intensity of his concentration, feeling alive to the multitudinous possibilities inherent in everything, feeling himself capable of understanding everything. In the small hours of the m
orning he often feels on the brink of a revelation or an illumination, close to the secret that unlocks some mystery of science and, if he fully attends, he will decipher it – if he focuses his whole being he will feel the vibrations of infinitesimal strings or come within a hair’s breadth of deducing the quantum structure of time-space itself. And then the moment passes and the dawn arrives and he stands in his kitchen, flattened by the ludicrousness of these aspirations, these hallucinations.

  The bookshelves are all full. There are books stacked in alcoves and recesses, on windowsills and side tables, on the return landing, in boxes under the back stairs. He has not read a quarter of them. He used to devour books, but these days, after reading just a few lines or a single page, he gets a kind of mental image of the whole book. Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written. He remembers coming upon that line, the feeling of recognition it evoked. In his life there have been a few books that have left a lasting impression and on which he still sometimes dwells. Novels whose narrators experience certain moods and states of mind that he identifies with, and which are so subtle and delicate as to be almost impossible to describe. In those novels he found images and moods that he felt surprisingly connected to, and it is these connections that he hankers after. He can remember his exact surroundings and his state of mind when he read those novels, and those surroundings and those states of mind now seem inseparable from the characters and contents of the novels; there was no separation of worlds and the characters were as real and as stirring as if he and they were one, and they never afterwards left him.

  Like Bloom, he thinks. No, Bloom is more. He is always close. As close as his own jugular vein. A second self. They are substrates of each other. Out of the same egg … Castor and Pollux. Divided natures too. Two dreamers, schemers, sinners. Space travellers. Transposers of souls. Transitioners of realms.