For some, it would have been better to die than to live in disgrace. To those who believed in preordination, perhaps avoiding the war was to cheat God, to betray not only the army and the populace but destiny. Maybe some people survive past their chosen day. No one wanted to discuss the war that soon after it, but reminders were everywhere: they had rations until the 1950s, and the army—even the U.S. Army—remained until the 1960s. There were veterans everywhere, hobbling along with war wounds. One gentleman from Nailors Row had even lost an arm to a Japanese bayonet in Borneo. The psychological damage was generally unseen, in public at least. It tended to be housed in pubs and homes, behind closed doors.
All drunks are sentimentalists. They are mutually reinforcing conditions. It is easier to live in the past—especially a romanticized past that never existed—than to confront the present and face the future. If finding yourself occupying a narrowing sliver of what your life had been or could be, the temptation is to expand it through fictions, boasts, bolstered by the temporary confidence of intoxication.
After the war, most people wanted a quiet life, stability, a modicum of luxury. To forget, even if others could not. Gradually tales of the war did creep out, distorted by being contained for so long. The fog of war, the many perspectives, could hide a lot of inconvenient truths from strangers, but not from themselves. The mirror, however, was merciless in the precision of its reflection.
Jukebox
Fifteen years passed. Joseph and Needles had children. Seven of them, which was a relatively modest number for Catholic families at the time. The kids grew up and became teenagers; Derry, like all provincial towns, enacts an imitation of the big cities. Jukeboxes came in. Big bands modified from schmaltz to rock ’n’ roll. Youngsters dressed as teddy boys and girls. The churches condemned the youths as being in the grip of sexually rapacious communists. Effigies of Elvis were burned. Shows were picketed. Denunciations boomed from pulpits about the dance crazes of impressionable youths, as if the Twist were the danse macabre. They were still sending young mothers to work as serfs in the Magdalene Laundries, but this baby boom endangered the power they’d accumulated. The churches risked being swamped in a liberated tide, or rather, drained of congregations and influence. The fear, functioning so well for so long, was threatened by optimism. The Londonderry Sentinel declared that rock ’n’ roll was “endangering civilisation as we know it.” A mass jitterbug to Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” threatened to become a riot. A song came on the radio, “Pledging My Love.” “Why can’t you listen to nice, wholesome music like that?” Not realizing the singer Johnny Ace was already dead from a backstage game of Russian roulette. Joseph would sing songs quietly to himself. The words and melodies of which go unrecorded.
Thimblerig
In the daytime our little family had only one regular visitor. Needles. She was small and quiet, with dark, dark hair. Her daughter Rosie said she wore scarves around her head with rollers that made her look like the queen. She’d call me over and sit me on her knee, ruffling my blond mop of hair. I was always intrigued by her, but a little reserved. Her features were sharp and pale, her skin a map that made her look older than her years. She looked the way witches did in my picture books, and I wondered if there were good witches.
There was a story, less a story than a rumor, that Needles once read palms. She foresaw the future for a living. In a religious society, where everything is part of God’s plan, that plan—the future—could conceivably be uncovered in advance. Yet it was heretical, for it was subverting God’s will and it had the stench of free will. Nevertheless, people tried to find out what was to come, through signs in the environment: the way birds flew, patterns in smoke, the ripples from a stone cast on water or sand, ideograms in clouds, the paths that water took through the landscape. Invariably they tried to find out the future so they could change it.
It seemed, however, that the rumor had been garbled. It was not fortune-telling that Needles had performed at traveling fairs, but “find the pony” or thimblerig: placing a ball under cups, a sleight of hand aided by stooges planted in the crowd. It was a confidence trick, centuries old—older even than Christianity. It was, in a way, its own form of subversion. There in the rabble days, six of them occurring annually in late spring and winter, among the spectators, stalls, quacks, salesmen, pickpockets, trick-o’-the-loop men, dentists, blood-letters, and army recruiters, Needles staked her place, shuffling cups and talking the talk. She learned to be tough, to talk tough, to face down anyone in that crowd, should they turn nasty, and to do it with charisma, to keep the other patrons laughing.
That was not to say Needles did not try to foresee the future. While raising her children, she discovered she had breast cancer. The treatment was traumatic. The perception then (until fairly recently even) was that cancer was a death sentence. People could not even broach it directly in words. It was referred to as “the Big C,” as if saying its name would invoke some kind of curse, and those who mentioned it would somehow become afflicted. It was like the black death in folk memory. To look too intently at it could bring no good. Such was the fear of wasting away or being eaten from within. I could never understand, as a child, how the word cancer also referred to a star sign in astrology. I did not know its origin in the Latin for “crab,” which originated in the shape of veins around tumors and the thought of claws digging in, directed by soulless eyes. There was a body horror to it, like the beauty of pregnancy inverted into something obscene. Something growing inside you. Needles dreaded the cancer ever returning, with a biblical fear, and it seems, from insinuations toward the end, that she thought it had returned. Death perhaps was her way of escaping dying.
I didn’t remember the last time my mother and I saw Needles, though the memory must be in there somewhere. Where else would it go—the things we experience but forget? Lost in the heady dream of childhood that nothing will change, that everything will remain and there will always be time, I did not keep track, or know to keep track, of what was happening. Every time I thought of Needles, I pictured her in her house. The bare walls and floors. Weird little things. A carved Brian Boru harp on the windowsill. All the brambles in her back garden. The sun on the front door. A riotous assembly of children always gathered around. Yet I could not retrieve that last memory from the banks in my mind, even though it was later than the rest. There seemed no logic to the storage. It was like trying to recall the end of a dream, having only just become aware that you are awake. Scenes were spliced together. They were missing sections, or ones were at the wrong speed or with the wrong voices. Most often they faded into nothingness so absolute and formless that it was not even a discernible void of black or white, but true nonexistence.
“We spent most of the time hiding in a room at the back of the house,” my mother said. “Needles was bruised. She didn’t look herself. I couldn’t look. You know that waxwork look they get? It was worse than that—a lot worse. I wanted to remember her how she was. It just wasn’t her.
“There was this horrible fog over us all. I’ve always hated wakes. All the whispers. How crowded it gets. And awkward. When do you get people to leave? What do you say? And the keeners; well, they’re not keeners anymore, they don’t get paid as such, but you know those old biddies who turn up, having barely known the person or actively disliked them, and they take over and hold court. Vultures. Plus the family, as you well know, are reserved. It made it more distressing. They weren’t ready for it. It wasn’t fair. Everyone coming in and out was overwhelming. We just stayed out of the way together until she was safely buried.”
Suddenly I remembered something. Not the last time or viewing the body, but being in a room while the wake happened next door. A memory that I forgot I had. Reading a book while people came and went, the sound of sobbing and talking through the walls, people checking on me occasionally. I read a book on how, by 2020, cities would be built on the ocean floor, illustrated with people swimming around with fins and gills. And I looked at objects around th
e room, thinking how strange it was that they survived when the person who owned them was now gone. That a useless object could outlive its owner.
What powers grief seems to be the proximity to before, so close but so unreachable. It is the torment of Tantalus. The world of before is within sight. It is just a few days, even hours, earlier. Everything looks almost the same, and yet it might as well be a thousand years ago, such is the change. It gives the continuing world an unreal, uncanny feel. When they say that time heals, it doesn’t. It just extends this proximity, like watching a ship sail away as you float in the sea. The past is irretrievable, but so, too, is the future that could have been, had things just kept going.
I was not old or close enough to really feel grief’s force, the intrusive waves of thought that sweep in out of nowhere, the torturously pleasant dreams that they were still here. My abiding memory was a kind of silent, gnawing terror, the dimensions of which I could not fathom and was too afraid to inquire about. It terrified me, the mix of paralysis and puzzlement, the fact that contrary to everything I had previously assumed, no adult had an answer; they, too, were all stricken, all the fundamentally strong characters. No one knew. For a year or more after her death, I noticed that the light never went off in my parents’ room at night.
“Why was she called Needles?” I asked.
“Well…” My mother sighed. “She was needle sharp, and she let everyone know it. When she felt like it. She gave me a desperate time at the beginning. Called me ‘princess’ ’cause I came from a ‘fancy’ part of town. Didn’t matter I was from a council estate. I gave her a wide berth for a while, at the start. I realized though, eventually, that her bark was worse than her bite and she’d gone through a lot in her own life. And then we got to talking. I grew to like her very much.”
Everyone had nicknames. There was an aversion in Derry, maybe in all working class cities, to calling people by their actual names. There was my da’s younger brother, who was called Skin. And Budgie, who was raised with my father as one of his siblings but was technically my cousin. Everyone had a nickname, whether they wanted to or not. I was called Andy by my friends. Most of the time the nicknames were affectionate, but there was still a degree of coercion to them. If someone was to insist, however politely, on being called their real name, the reaction would be one of derision. It would be taken as a sign of arrogance and snobbery. Who do they think they are, insisting on having their own name? A lot of the time nicknames had a cruel wit to them. A kid with polio was called Big Shoe. There was a guy who walked around with a disability that meant his neck was crooked, and his face permanently looked upward diagonally. They called him Birdwatcher. It was merciless. Mahogany Shoulder was a frequent funeral attender. Micky the Moth was notorious for finding house parties at night by their lights. Some nicknames were amusing, no doubt, but they could be vicious too. I hung around with one kid who stressed out his younger brother so much, with taunts and nicknames, that the kid’s hair started to fall out. There was a point where keeping people’s feet on the ground became trying to nail them into it. I didn’t know if my grandmother approved or disapproved of the name Needles, but it clung to her.
“She was different. Needles had what was called ‘bad nerves’ back then. A lot of people have it now, and you’d get tablets for it. She called herself an alcoholic, but she’d only ever sit with a single bottle of stout, two at most. She was a slight wee thing. Just a coping mechanism or habit, I guess. A kind of veil.
“Towards the…” My mother paused. “Well, she started to come more often, down to our house. I’d keep her a bite of dinner, then some lunch, supper. She’d stay longer and call earlier. And she started telling me stuff. Your da denies it, but as far as I’m concerned, she said what she said. He wasn’t there and he doesn’t want to know, but she told me all this stuff … about the hiring fairs. Those were auctions in the town square where girls and boys would be sold off to go and work seasonally for farmers. There was a lot of stigma back then that’s still in people now, however modern we seem. They’re still horrified by it. The workhouse and everything. We forget that lasted until after the war. She was really, really poor. They used to have the fairs up at the Diamond. ‘The Rabbles’ they called them. You were hired out for months at a time to work. They’d barter for them. She used to talk … insinuate … about the troubles she had with them.”
She paused thoughtfully. “She opened up more and more towards the end. Needles was obsessed with him. Her ‘Joesy,’ she called him. Fool that I was, when I was young, I thought it was romantic. In fact it was terrible. She couldn’t move on. She was stuck in time. She couldn’t go back and she couldn’t go forward without him.”
I suddenly recalled that photo of my grandfather, and a line or a paragraph from a book I’d read somewhere, on how Aborigines forbid photos or footage, or even the naming of the dead. Maybe they had a point.
“She’d come down on Sundays. Perch by the fire. I’d feed her homemade vegetable soup. That was her excuse, but I knew it was to see you. The only thing I ever saw that got her off the sofa was you. She’d stoop down to you, and you’d be playing there with your Star Wars toys and your A-Team van. ‘Don’t let him be an only child,’ she said. I’ll never forget that as long as I live. The last time we saw her must have been up at her house on Osborne Street. She came out to give you a big hug on the wee path. I always remember her, leaning over that last time, saying to you—and you with your blond curly hair—‘Bye-bye, wee darling. Bye-bye.’ None of us ever saw her again.”
Needles left no note, or at least none was ever found. Nothing to take comfort from or fixate on. She just left. “Death by misadventure,” the coroner typed, out of kindness perhaps, given the lingering Catholic idea of eternal limbo for the lost souls of those who took their own lives. She was slight, and it was conceivable that a sudden gust had caused her to lose her footing on the quay’s edge. She’d visit the docks every week, like clockwork. A bus driver regularly saw her on his route, kneeling at the place her husband had drowned. Maybe she went there to talk or to weep, or just to sit and look at the water. It’s believed that Needles followed her husband, twenty years later, into the river at the very same point. I tried to imagine her there, as the driver saw her in passing, but her face—seen fleetingly from behind—is always obscured.
In truth, there are many ways to drown. The Chinese poet Li Bai died trying, in ecstatic drunkenness, heroic and idiotic, to hug the moon’s reflection in the Yangtze River. The American poet Hart Crane climbed over the railings of a Caribbean cruise ship in his pajamas, believing himself to be “quite disgraced,” and leapt and was last seen swimming for the horizon, impossibly far out to sea. Virginia Woolf waded into the River Ouse with her pockets full of stones, believing her mental instability was returning and seeking permanent respite: “I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.” The Japanese general Taira no Koremori, who preferred reading to war, drowned himself after fleeing a battle at the sound of a flock of birds, and having been fooled by flags and fires that larger forces had amassed. We search in complex fates for single notes that will chime with us. Suicide, however, is a plural thing, even in the death of a single person.
My mother and I were the last to see Needles, or rather, the last to see her who knew her well. It’s certain she passed many on her journey from Rosemount, through the town, to the river. Those who walked past her in the street were unaware that here was a lady who would never exist again, on her way to exiting the world.
Coin
The train line ran alongside the river. We used to place coins on the tracks as kids to flatten the queen’s head. “Our part in the revolution.” The train passed Gransha Lake, a backwater or slough behind the tributary. It was set in the proximity of the “big house,” the local psychiatric hospital. While it was no lon
ger accepted that the planet Saturn exerted a melancholic influence, people still spoke of the influence of the moon on matters beyond tides, matters of the mind. A person was “wired to the moon,” as the saying went. There were woods there, and the deeper you went in, the more it turned into marsh and the less you could count on the ground being stable. We had ventured over there as boys, deep into forbidden territory. I don’t know what we had expected to find. What we did find were rusting beer cans, porno mags stuffed into the bushes, undergarments scattered without explanation across a forest floor. Solar systems of sunlit midges existed there in rooms of light under the canopy. Vernal ponds, depending on the time of year and rainfall, that made a person further mistrust the land beneath them. I did not tell my friends back then why I paused at the train tracks or crossed them, as they larked around up at the giant graffiti-strewn pillars and added their own scrawls. I did not tell them this was where my grandmother had been found.
In the time before black-box recorders on planes, they would have to put together the pieces to understand how a crash occurred, trace the clues back, reanimate the dead.
The train tracks continued on a long arc toward Waterside station, passing woodland that merges treacherously into reeds and wetland, an area called Rosses Bay. The western end of the inlet was once called Troy, the eastern the Crook. My maternal grandfather, Anthony, a fisherman, knew it by the name Otter Bay. Others, much earlier, had called it Port Rois. At the time of Genghis Khan, the sack of Constantinople, and the Fourth Crusade, there was a sea and land battle between rival clans on this obscure corner of Christendom. The McDermotts launched a doomed ambush on thirteen ships of the O’Donnells and were routed. The surrounding land remains named Caw, from the Gaelic for “battle.” Language remembered what people had long forgotten.
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