by Orna Ross
“Come on. You can’t walk in those wet jeans. I’m bringing you home to dry.”
He lifts me like I weigh nothing, settles me into place: my knees looped over one arm, the rest of me curled tight into his chest. His wet sweater soaks my cheek but underneath is the heat and smell of his skin. After a few minutes of carrying me, his breathing becomes alarming.
“You don’t have to carry me. Put me down.”
“No…Least I…can…do…”
“Rory, I mean it. You can hardly breathe. Put me down.”
“…Nearly…there.”
“Where?”
“Car…park. Don’t talk…”
He has a car? He deposits me at the passenger door of a VW Beetle, grey and ancient. When he’s regained his breath he asks, “Do you like it? My sister gave me an advance on my grant.”
“You’re on a grant?”
“Every farmer in Ireland gets a grant, no matter how many acres they have. Creative form-filling.” He opens the door for me. “Hop in.”
I sit in onto the leather seat with a squelch.
“If you spent your grant on a car, what are you going to live on?”
“The old man has given me some money and I’ve got myself a job. Barman at the Arrow.”
“All in two days?”
“Not bad, eh?”
We drive out of Belfield, down the dual carriageway to Donnybrook, but instead of turning right for my flat in Sandymount, he goes left, towards Ranelagh.
“I live the other way.”
“Do you want to go home? I was going to bring you to my place.”
“Oh.”
“Is that all right? There’s a launderette beside me. They’ll dry the clothes for us.”
His flat is wonderful: two rooms and a bathroom all to himself. Like most students, I am sharing. Dee and I have rented a cramped bedsit with a mini-kitchen in the corner. Its flowery wallpaper and swirly carpet combination makes me feel seasick, but I love it because Mrs D. had wanted me to live in a university hostel run by nuns. The idea of Dee and me loose in Dublin with no supervision filled her with horror but Maeve and Granny Peg came in on my side and she had to give in.
Rory’s flat is in a different league: smooth beige walls and floors, a suite of furniture that matches, a breakfast bar, a dining table for four. On one of the walls, he has put up a poster of ‘Che’ Guevara, on the others two Salvador Dali prints.
“This is lovely,” I say.
“I spent all summer planning the sort of place I wanted. I’ve everything in place now. Well, almost everything.”
He sends me a significant look that makes me shiver.
“Come on. We’d better get you out of those clothes.”
Everything he says has two meanings. He doesn’t seem to notice.
He plays the gentleman then: shows me how to use the shower; presents me with his dressing gown, soap, shampoo, towels. I undress. The water is strong and hot and I stay under its comfort for a long time. Afterwards, I wrap myself in his robe and find his smell wafting up to my nostrils every time I move my arms.
When I come out of the bathroom, he is sitting at the counter, wearing only a towel. Hair black and silky as a pelt covers his chest and weaves down his legs to the bare feet resting on the bar of the stool. He has a curl of black hair on each big toe. On the counter, a cup of tea is waiting for me, steaming.
“You can put your clothes into that bag over there,” he says. “I’ll bring them down to the launderette when I’ve had my shower.”
While he is showering, I sip my tea, look at his books. Stephen King. Leon Uris. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Lord of the Rings. Boy’s books. On another shelf, beside a large professional-looking camera, are some photography books: some instructional – The Guide to Freelance Photography – others full of pictures. I flick through them for a while then I notice a brown manila folder with a black-and-white picture peeping out. I open it and lay the pictures I find out on the counter. At first they look abstract, a series of unusual shapes taken from different angles, then I realize I am looking at close-ups of animal body parts: a cow’s udder, a horse’s nostril, a sheep’s tail, a pig’s eye. I sit up on the stool to look closely. They are strange, these fragments of bodies, almost alien.
The bathroom door clicks and he comes back out. Dressed. Fully dressed: jeans, T-shirt, even socks.
“Oh, God, those pictures,” he says, when he sees them laid out.
“You took them?”
“Guilty as charged.” He is blushing, just a little.
“No, they’re good. Different.”
He shakes his head. “They didn’t work. But I think I’m on to something. I need to keep working it out.”
Uncombed knots of wet hair hang down his back, spattering a line of wet across his T-shirt. He sits beside me on the second high stool, close enough to touch. I smell on him the sharp soap that has also washed me.
“So,” he says with a smile, “if our mammies could see us now.”
What he said to me at the wedding. My heart leaps to the words and then – somehow – we are leaning into each other and kissing and I am off my stool and he is off his and we are wrapped around each other and I am straining towards him and one of his hands has slipped inside my dressing gown onto my bare body and is gliding across my skin.
He pushes the robe from my shoulders so it slithers to the floor. The buckle of his belt is digging into my belly, and the prod of his swelling underneath it. I am naked against him. Inside me, lust rears. I lean into him, wanting to swallow him up. I want to do everything with him, everything, anything. This is it, at last. What I have been waiting for.
Surge
1995
I know all about TB, or “consumption” as they called it in Gran’s day. Hippocrates’s “Captain of the Three Men of Death”, it was one constituent in Richard’s cocktail of killers.
Inhaled from the coughing or sneezing of an infected person, the bacillus lodges itself in the alveoli of the lungs, encasing itself within a waxy cell wall as the immune system and white blood cells rally to fight it, so that equal numbers of bacteria survive as are killed. This, the latent phase of the disease, can go on for years, even decades. An internal war rages but the body is unaware, feels nothing.
Then, for some reason – pregnancy, HIV, hunger, stress, age or, sometimes, nothing obvious — the balance tips and the bacteria begin to win, slowly but steadily replicating until each white blood cell is so full that it bursts. The alveoli fill, the walls of the lung become inflamed, begin to bleed. Now the disease is in the blood, able to swim to every organ: kidneys, intestines, brain, heart.
Today is Friday. I’ve been standing outside my shed for almost an hour, watching the tide come in. I think it’s approaching its highest point now: the waves are lapping tight around Coolanagh and the wide expanse of sand that borders either side of The Causeway at low tide has narrowed to a strip. Perhaps it has already turned? From here it’s impossible to tell the moment when its seemingly unstoppable advance goes into retreat.
What would happen, I wonder, if some day the mechanism that turns the tide faltered, if the water just kept on coming? We trust the ocean to do what it does, what it has always done, but what if one day the workings of our world failed us?
I sigh. I don’t want to be here like this, staring out to sea, thinking strange thoughts. I want be in my shed, at my table, working on my writing. But my writing has rejected me. So I stare a while longer and think longingly of how it used to be when the words flowed through me as if they came from somewhere else, when all I had to do was turn up and catch them and write them down. Now memories hurt me in the remembering and the events of the past resist me, twist out from under my pen.
Every so often Gran writes in her diary how she would die – “just die” – if anyone were to read what she writes. Does this extend to her granddaughter reading her words after her death? I don’t know, I honestly
don’t. For hours, I sit immobile, rearranging papers, staring at an empty page wondering if I should be doing this at all. Or standing like this in front of the ocean, feeling that the endless movement of the waves has a lesson for me, if I could only work out what it might be.
At least I can still run. I’m further up the beach than I usually go, and I run close to the little cliff, so I cannot be seen from above. Rory’s house is set on top, a new build, with peaked dormer windows set into the roof, large windows and French doors overlooking the sea. What Americans call an “executive home”. Her choice, he tells me.
I imagine her looking out from her window, a queen in her castle, and seeing me running past. That is why I hug the cliff. If she is queen of the castle, what am I?
It’s another mile or two before the beach peters out and I run on, pushing myself faster than usual, stretching for something. I run until the beach turns shingly. Up ahead, I can see where it becomes too narrow and rocky to pass. I turn then, retrace my steps, pulling back the pace, settling into a gentler rhythm, more even breathing. From this end of the beach, The Causeway and Coolanagh look tiny, like miniature models of themselves. I feel like I could run through any limitation. It’s only a feeling, I know. It won’t last.
I’ve been spending a long time with Norah’s notebooks and they are much harder work than Gran’s — full of passages that lie flat on the page, unconnected to each other or to any clear meaning. Her handwriting is difficult, jerking into tight angles and sometimes ignoring margins and lines. This morning, I was furrowing through, copying out phrases that struck me, searching for something.
Now as I run, one of those disconnected phrases comes rising in my mind. Did it say what I now think it said? Or am I imposing a meaning? I race back to the shed and, without cooling down, go straight to the desk and, heart panting, rustle through the pages, trying to find the paragraph.
There. I read it again. My heart recognises its significance and starts to drum-drum-drum, a pulse of excitement that makes me go back and read the words yet again, this time with every sense keen and quivering.
My mind flings up thought after thought.
The day speeds past. When Rory comes on his nightly visit, I send him away. It is dark by then, too dark to write any more, but I don’t want to sever the link to what I’ve just started to know. It’s as though I’ve jumped off a cliff and have to concentrate on flapping my arms to keep myself airborne.
“I can’t see you tonight.”
“What? Why?”
“I’m sorry. I’ll explain the next time. Please. Go.”
Next day, I am steadier. I see that I had been trying to write the story straight, to outline and explain, draw conclusions, elucidate lessons learned: the Sue Denim school of writing, hard and clear and certain of its standpoint.
Norah is leading me to a new place. What she has revealed can never be contained within my well-wrought structure. I have to get out of the way, trust the words to arrive and place themselves on the page, know that the writing knows more than me.
1922
Diary 2nd September 1922
Dan O’Donovan was in the paper, and the outrageous speech he made at the Dunore inquest was quoted in full. I’m copying it out here:
“When the British forces were installed in Ireland, it was hard to find man or woman in Wexford with pluck enough to fight the foreign intruder. To my knowledge, no English soldier was fired upon around here during the whole of the Anglo-Irish war and I do not think I am wrong in stating that the present occasion is the first on which a soldier was killed in Wexford since 1798. The Truce begot a lot of warriors and those now attacking the National Army are just emerging from the burrows where the British terror drove them.
“Hysterical young females are among the most active adherents to the Irregular cause because hitherto it has been safe to be so. They disfigure walls with lying propaganda and they are active carriers of documents, arms and ammunition. Some have been known to accompany men on expeditions of murder, concealing arms in their clothes until required and taking them back when used, relying for safety on the chivalry of those whose deaths they are out to execute.
“This ambush was a contemptible attack. Those who did these foul deeds may call themselves warriors but I would call them murderers.”
Jesus, Mary and Holy St Joseph, the superiority of the man. He feels safe in vilifying us now because of the outrage and recrimination being hurled from all sides. As Mammy says, people haven’t the brains they were born with. Can’t they see it is one and the same cause as has been fought in this country since 1916, a cause they all claim to support? Can’t they see it’s one and the same tactics? Dan O’Donovan can’t, it seems. What was brave and revolutionary when it was him is “hysterical” now.
Father John condemned the Dunore actions from the altar yesterday morning. Sunday after Sunday now, his sermon is nothing but a tirade of political abuse. It’s getting very awkward. Mostly I avoid him and I’ve come to notice lately that the reason I’m so successful is that he is avoiding me too. He’s no keener to have a conversation about the matter than I am. For all his huffery and puffery when he’s protected by his pulpit, he’s no brave-heart when he has to speak one-to-one.
What he, and all the others who find it so easy to condemn, fail to realise is that we fully understand the horror of killing. None understand it better than us, the ones risking our necks. How can a man of God ask another man or woman to ignore their most sacred oath? How can a spiritual leader — for that is what he is supposed to be — care so little for the principle of the thing?
No. I go beyond Father John to the good Lord Himself. Please God, do not forsake us, in our hour of need. Keep us safe. Deliver us onto the promised land. A free people in a free Republic -- that is what Ireland deserves. That is what we offer up our lives for, and if necessary, our deaths.
God save Ireland.
* * *
Diary 4th September
The raid we’d been waiting for since the Dunore action came last night. At eleven o’clock they arrived, two lorry-loads of them, but no Dan, thank God. They started beating down the doors with their rifle butts. As well as ourselves, every man drinking in the pub was hauled out onto the road while they went through our goods and belongings. Even Mammy was brought out of her sickbed, shivering, into the night cold (but of course defiant). When I saw her there, like that, I could have run them through with a bayonet myself. I said nothing for the whole entire time, let Daddy do the talking for us, because I was afraid of what would come out of my mouth.
They gave the place an awful going-over, everything out of the cupboards and drawers again, though I’d only just got them back to rights after the last time. The locks on the bureau are busted and they butted in some of the wood panelling in the parlour. To fix it will cost a fortune. They even took the Sacred Heart down from the wall, the soldier blessing himself as he removed it. Another brave warrior took it upon himself to break some of the crockery in the kitchen. Black-and-Tans were gentlemen compared to some of these boyos.
Bad and all as the wreckage is, what worries me more is how close they came to finding my stash, including this diary. I had it in the usual place, which I’ve always thought of as foolproof, but they spent so long going through that particular corner of that particular room, it was as if they had a tip-off. So I’ve made the decision that tomorrow I will put some of the stuff into Molly’s safekeeping for a while and find a new place, beyond their ken. It’s harder with them than it used to be with the English, because our secrets were once theirs.
Barney is having a night home here for a change, which we’re counting on as safe, please God, after last night’s raid, as they’ll hardly come again so soon. And it’s a cold one, unseasonably bitter again. The poor chap was in dire need of a bit of comfort: after a wash, a shave and a feed, he put on fresh clothes and felt like a new man. He’s sleeping now, on the settle bed in the bottling store. Norah managed a small while with him and pr
omised a longer time tomorrow so he went to sleep happy.
* * *
Diary 9th September
More reprisals for Dunore. “Lieutenant” O’Donovan arrived out from Wexford with a party that proceeded to set fire to a row of cottages on the Wexford road. The Whites own one of those cottages. I can pardon him for backing the treaty, but to be so zealous in the punishment of old friends, to watch Lama’s mother who once fed him tea and welcomes, wailing in her daughters’ arms? This is not the Dan O’Donovan I knew.
Lucky the worst of the blaze was put out before too much damage was done. Lama says his parents have a legal cause for action against the government, that no parliament could ever be seen to give its army the right to go around firing houses. He thinks we should also make a claim for the number of times we’ve been raided and smashed up but Mammy says no, she’d rather be homeless than ask that crowd for compensation. I told Lama to hold fast, that he would only be wasting time and energy, and that his best redress would come when we broke these tyrants as we broke their English friends.
Meanwhile, all classes of blackguards are taking advantage of the situation, even worse than before. We’ve got used to robbers holding up banks and post offices under the name of the IRA but for several weeks, a band of armed thieves has been terrorizing the Rathmeelin district, calling to houses late at night with masked faces, demanding money at gunpoint, claiming to be Republican soldiers. We had a fair idea who the culprits might be, but it took time to be sure. Saturday night, the lads went after them and made an arrest. They were brought before a Republican court set up in the Sinn Féin Hall and found guilty. On Sunday morning, the lads tied them to the front of the chapel gates and put a label on each of them saying: “Robbers Beware! The IRA is on your track! Leave the Country within 24 hours!” They also put a placard beside them, detailing the affair and setting down their names and addresses.
