Thin Places

by Kerri ni Dochartaigh

  The lough was never officially given to either side – North or South – in the Partition of Ireland in 1922, and afterwards both the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland claimed it as their territory. In fact, even now, both sides call it their own, although the actual administration of the lough is handled by a joint, cross-border body established under the auspices of the Good Friday Agreement. This lough, then, lies in between the two countries, neither truly of one or the other – a fitting state for a place whose name comes from the depths of ancient myth.

  There is a very old folk tale about the origin of Lough Foyle, one of the nine lakes that burst over land, which claims that its name means ‘the borrowed lough’.

  Two sisters dwelling beyond the Shannon, skilled in necromancy, made a deal, the one with the other. This story says that one of them was a hag who had a black heart. She asked her younger sister from Connemara (the wilderness on the western edge of Ireland) for the loan of a lake: ‘Give me the loan of your silver lake, for I have none, and I promise to return it to you when tomorrow comes.’ The Connemara witch rolled the lake up and sent it to her sister, only for her deceitful elder sister to then refuse to give it back: ‘Ha, ye foolish child, what I meant to say from these lips of mine was – Judgement Day. I will keep your lake until the ending of time; for tomorrow, my sister, never ever comes.’

  The River Foyle has shaped many of our lives, us border dwellers, and it is shaping them still. With Brexit, the river will shape-shift once more, to become a customs post: a threshold that must be crossed to pass from one place to the other, the ghost line made as visible as possible through human form. Already, on both sides of the border, police forces have stated they will not man any hard border that would be imposed once more on this island. The future of the Foyle, no matter who does or does not ‘own’ it, is back to being the stuff of near myth.

  The year my father was born, 1963, grown men and young weans alongside one another, from both sides of the water in the city of Derry-Londonderry, played football matches on top of a frozen River Foyle. For many of these individuals, that winter of ‘The Big Freeze’ would be the first and last time they would ever ‘set foot’ on the other side of their fiercely divided city. Catholic lads on the left wing went well beyond the midway point on the ice; Protestant goalies pushed right up to within inches of the quay, far away from the safety of the Waterside where they belonged; each and every one of them was a foreigner in that alien, temporary and utterly neutral zone within their home town. All historical and imagined boundaries the river normally created were now displaced, dislocated, hidden from all view.

  •

  Just over a year ago, in November 2018, as that old year made moves to give up its delicate ghosts, I lay in Leeds and let a stranger draw a wild canary onto my left arm. There are many ways to handle shadows, and placing black ink on your body’s surface is one of them. From the moment the bird made its way onto my skin, I haven’t drunk a single drop of alcohol.

  I had known for quite some years that alcohol was numbing me, keeping dark parts of me covered up with a thin film. I knew all those murky memories were still there, untouched, but they were being held safely far enough from my reach not to have to ever deal with them. Just like the childhood possessions people keep in their parents’ loft years after moving away from home, I didn’t need to worry about the chaotic pile of memories buried deep in that brain-bog-attic. Nor did I need to worry about the Beatrix Potter books, my first diaries, Missy (my Cabbage Patch doll) or the Sylvanian families I had loved so dearly. They were all left behind, long ago, one September, when our home in the predominantly Protestant Waterside council estate was petrol-bombed by sectarian youths, a handful of months after my father (the only Protestant who’d lived in the house) had left it. Derry-Doire-Londonderry in the 1990s is a place I have only just started to remember free from black smoke and bombs.

  It is very recently indeed that I began to remember its disco with spangled bracelets and troll T-shirts the night after the president of America talked to us about bridges of peace. That city with its soldiers at the bus stop, at school, on the corner, at the border, the beach. With its helicopters keeping you from sleep, its surnames keeping you from everywhere that you wanted to go, its poverty keeping you either from, or in, trouble. With its barriers keeping you from everywhere, its boundaries keeping its everything away from its everything else.

  I had never really ‘been a drinker’ as they say where I come from. I never went ‘up the walls’ as a teenager – with a telltale blue plastic or brown paper bag full of cheap alcohol. I never tried – the way many of my friends did – to carry myself out of myself – away elsewhere – with drink. I spent my teenage years, and all of my early twenties too scared of alcohol to even consider drinking a single drop. Alcohol had, and continues to have, an extremely destructive impact on members of both sides of my family. But at some dark point it caught up with me. Alcohol has been the only thing that has broken close relationships within the blood line that flows on each side of my lineage. It took me seven years to realise I was coursing along a track laid out for me decades earlier, by family members I loved but that I desperately didn’t want to end up like.

  Drink – and all the violence and sorrow it carries in its wake – terrified me. The night I first drank more than a sip – when I look back on it now – was the night I first began to feel the darkness from my past trickle out of me again, like melting ice under an unforgiving winter sun. I was twenty-eight, and just about to graduate from my Waldorf teacher training degree. I’d spent three years with a group of really wonderful, inspiring people but the whole time I’d felt an increasingly severe self-loathing and doubt. I was convinced that I would never, ever, be able to let go of all the baggage I was carrying around with me no matter how hard I tried. I never felt good enough, for anything or for anyone. I look back at that version of me and I so desperately want to reassure her with the experiences of almost a decade. Hindsight is an odd thing.

  It was my birthday party, in the flat on the Meadows in Edinburgh which I shared with three other women around my age. That year, as I moved towards the end of my first decade of adult life, things from my past were rearing their ugly, scary heads much more frequently than they had previously. Those memories, anxieties and heartaches seemed to have not only intensified but to come with much less warning than they had before. At the start they came in the form of mild panic attacks: difficulty breathing, lightheadedness and fear of crowded rooms. This was more or less manageable for a while; focusing on breathing helped, and taking off my shoes; it became a kind of surreal party trick in places, and with people I felt uncomfortable around. When it came to any form of long-term planning – trying to envisage where I might be in a year, or what I might be doing – it rattled me so much that I had to stop. I missed out on trips, didn’t apply for courses, decided against going for promotions. I had begun to think about life as a place – like all those I’d live in – that I might be better off leaving. I was terrified to let people down but I knew I was close to a tipping point, and I had no idea what it would look like when the towers I’d built around myself could hold up no longer.

  It made no sense back then. I’d moved so far away from where the trauma had all happened, and was leading a life that seemed successful – that looked so good on the surface. I had a secure job, a warm flat, good people to share it with, kind friends that accepted the coldness that often defined me. I was someone who had been let down so badly by those who were meant to look after me that I struggled with trust every step of the way. I had been looking out for myself, almost entirely, since my mid teens, and as a result of that I had no understanding of how to ask for help. This came across at many points, to many good people around me, as frosty and unfeeling – like I didn’t need them, like I didn’t need anyone or anything. I had lived a life with so few people in it, one where people and places came and went more quickly than the seasons, and I had no idea how to change that
pattern, how to learn the way to allow people to stay.

  I went back every few months to see my mum and younger brothers in Derry, and I constantly felt out of kilter. I had left Derry behind but I hadn’t properly settled in Edinburgh either. I didn’t fit in anywhere, and I didn’t have people in either place that I felt I could talk to about what I was going through. I knew my mum had enough of her own stuff to carry and the friends I’d made in Edinburgh knew so little of what I’d gone through that I was at a complete loss to know where to begin.

  If you fill a bucket of water so close to the brim that you can’t really manage to carry it properly, the water will spill out at some point. You might lose the water in drips and drops – sloshing over the edges here and there – or you might lose the whole lot in one go, falling over with the weight that you could never have hoped to carry alone.

  That first night I got drunk, nearing the end of my twenties, was my spilling point. The physical manifestation of the changes that had been happening deep inside me for a long time. In many spiritual circles, the year you turn twenty-eight is viewed as a massive turning point and marks a huge shift in your sense of self, and how you relate to that self, and to the experiences that self has gone through. It is called your ‘Saturn return year’, and is the point in your journey round the sun in which Saturn is in exactly the same position it was when you were born. The lead-up to this age starts in your late twenties and, many believe, the ripples of the transformation you experience might continue right through into your early thirties.

  Whether you believe in the effects of the heavenly bodies or not, very often people seem to experience a deeply unsettling, utterly transformational period of their lives during these particular years. Past traumas often resurface, and there seems no way through without a crutch of one form or another. Everyone close to me was getting engaged, married, having children, buying cars and houses, travelling the world. I see now that for some of those people, these things were their buttress, the support that kept them upright in a life charged by changing winds. I, on the other hand, drank, and tried to pretend that I needed nothing and no one to deal with the past. I had buried it deep enough – I was sure – that I need not ever worry. I drank a little bit, almost every day. I very rarely socialised, and I very rarely got drunk. I mostly drank alone, a means of quietening things down inside my head, just enough to function. I drank in the way that meant that as soon as hard times came along, as they often did, I craved the numbness that a drink gave me more than I craved the taste of the drink itself. I drank as a way to drown out thoughts and memories that, if allowed to surface properly, I was sure would kill me, stone-cold and ghost-riddled.

  I spent years trying over and over and over again to stop drinking. I bargained with myself; I played my self off against its own shadow-self. I knew then – as I still know now – that I drank as a form of self-harm. Self-hatred is an incredibly difficult thing to understand or to try to stop. Even trying to accept that I was abusing myself – over and over – was more difficult than I can really find the words for. I sometimes still feel like maybe I have no right to talk about these things – these feelings – these experiences that are fully mine to own, and to work through as best I can.

  Then, on a fairly nondescript day in autumn 2018 – as a wedge of swans flew above me and below a whispered crescent moon – standing not in any sacred or special place but in a Derry laneway cluttered with a broken pram and black bin bags, I decided that before the new year came, I was going to stop. I decided that I was going to stop, and that I would do every single thing within my power to never ever start again. I knew the time had come to really face the experiences of my past face on – without the numbing help of a drink at the end of every single day. My past had been broken into pieces again and again due to alcohol, and I had no control over any of that. I thought I had got away untouched, unaffected, but I know now I was on exactly that same path of self-destruction and dependency as more people close to me than I care to even count. The time had come to let it all come to the surface. The time had come to allow it all to come back up from the place in which I’d tried to hide it. I was sick and tired of acting, of putting on a fake smile; I was tired of pretending I hadn’t lived the life I had. I wanted to look at the things I had gone through. I wanted to hold them close, to give them the room they needed – to give me the room I needed – to heal.

  •

  I was completely and utterly unprepared for the nightmares that would come in the weeks that followed cutting alcohol out of my life. It felt as though they were coming out of every pore of my body. It felt as though they were poison that had been lying in wait for a very long time indeed, accumulating over the years. Even when we think we do not have a problem with something – that we could cope easily without it – the way our body responds when starved of the thing leaves us knowing that the body begs to differ. Detox nightmares, in my experience, make for warped and hideous viewing.

  I am in the front garden of our old house in the Waterside.

  The house is on fire but instead of flames licking the walls and steaming up the windows it is a monstrous cat with the body of a teenage boy – one of the three who, in real life, set fire to our home with a handmade petrol bomb when I was eleven.

  The house is multiple storeys high – and growing higher still.

  But the house has now become every single house my mum, dad and I have ever lived in, together or separately. The windows are locked and the keys I hold in my sweating hands are the keys for my brother’s adulthood homes. I call to them all – my broken-up family – from an attic room, just as I am being wrapped up tightly inside a flag my granny crocheted out of her mother-in-law’s scorched hair.

  My father watches the house he once shared with us, silently.

  My father is standing outside watching a black crow talk to the boys who are making the bomb, as though the crow is his apprentice or replacement. As if, when my dad left us on our own on that concrete battlefield, that heathen, feathered vagrant of a bird took his place at the table.

  The reality of the night my family home was almost burned to the ground was, in actual fact, not that dissimilar to the nightmares in many respects. I was in my first year at big school. My wee brother was still in wee school. My mum was working three jobs just to scrape us all by after my dad left. A cat had, all out of nowhere, turned up the week before, and she refused to leave. She was black, and my brother and I knew in our bellies that she was magic.

  When the bomb came, it was noiseless, but she heard it.

  When the smoke came it was without a smell, but she smelled it.

  The claw marks the cat left on my face when she was wakening me in my smoke-filled bedroom left me embarrassed in school for months, but she made sure I woke up. She made sure we all did. That magical creature.

  My mother tried to stick it out, desperate to challenge the sectarianism that spilled out of all the cracks in the surfaces of our town. She wanted us to stay put, not to be put out. But as the days passed she accepted that the barrier had been built around us, and if we waited any longer we might not make it out at all.

  We were not Protestant, now that Dad had left. We were not Catholic, either, though; our mum had lost the right to that – in the eyes of many – after marrying a Protestant. The fact that they had divorced made the situation so much worse, in the view of those who sought to keep the divisions in Derry alive and strong. We were nothing other than other – indefinable, unnamable, fallen down into the gaps in between. The truth is, we had never been either of these things – Protestant or Catholic – and to live in Derry in the ’90s and to have neither of these words to fall back on left you in a harrowing hole of a place.

  The new family that got allocated our home that week, after the bomb drove us out, threw every single thing we’d left behind into the back garden as soon as they moved in. When we went to look for our things – our photos and letters, our toys and baby hair in envelopes, our yellow teapo
t, our mum’s beauty pageant trophies, our things found during walks on Donegal beaches across the hard border, we watched the equally hard new family pretend we weren’t there. There were no curtains for them to draw to keep our eyes away from looking into the house we had called home. It made no difference anyway, as no person or item could be properly made out through the (already bogging dirty) windows of the smoke-scorched house.

  We watched unidentifiable forms become wraith-like. The forms moved in the half-dark. They took off from a sofa we couldn’t see but we knew was the black leather sofa that we had left behind: ghost vultures.

  The childhood belongings were easy, so easy in fact, to forget. The human-size silken crow I met in my smoke-filled, fear-thick bedroom was not so easy to shake out of my head, unsurprisingly.

  He came that night, as if from a nightmare I couldn’t waken up from, and he was as real to me as the scratches that were left on my cheek.

  He didn’t creaaak or crawww.

  He didn’t fly or peck at the floor.

  He didn’t search for food, or for dead things.

  He did not lick the blood from my wounds.

  He forcibly ignored the cat that was keening at us both.

  When the smoke was at its thickest and most choking, he remained stone-cold silent, and as still as something long, long dead.

  The cheap door in the room had warped in the heat of the fire and it wouldn’t let me open it. The door would not let me leave. Somehow, the coal-black crow managed to land on the door. I watched as the wood lost its whiteness, as it gave itself over into the hands of a murderous, taunting bird. A bird that painted it black.

  That September night in 1995 – the year the Peace Process began, the first time I met my crow – he laughed and laughed and laughed at me but no sound escaped out of his smooth black beak. He laughed until I somehow found the strength to ram the door open into the hallway. Strength that I knew back then was definitely not mine. Strength that I knew he had categorically not expected me to find.