“Were you worried?”
“Some of the young boys on board got spooked. We started hanging on to anything that was tied down. We thought it would pass, but it got worse and we started to realize we were heading towards a rock called the Dutchman. Do you know it?”
I blinked back at him. “I don’t.”
Anthony knew the names and positions of hidden assassin rocks and treacherous currents, the vortexes and whorls that the uninitiated could not foresee.
“Well, it was just off the coast, which we were hugging. Rocks jutting out. It’d make mincemeat out of us, and we were headed right for it.”
“What did you do?”
“Some of the lads were crying. Some of them knelt down on the deck and started to pray.”
“Did you have life rafts? In case you went in.”
He batted away my question with a withering glance. “You didn’t go in.”
“But what if you fell in? Could you swim to the shore?”
“None of us learned to swim. None of the fishermen did. It’s bad luck.”
“But if—”
“If you went in, it was already too late.”
“You never went in?”
“You never went in.”
I stared out the window. The light was changing. “What about the drowned? Mum said you used to help bring in—”
Suddenly, a large thud interrupted us. I thought for a moment that one of the neighborhood kids had thrown a stone at the window and tried to look through the gaps in the fence; but then, from the corner of my eye, I noticed a little bird sideways on the ground. It had not seen the glass and had struck it at full speed, mid-flight. My grandfather had noticed none of this and carried on talking, but his stories no longer quite made sense. He was speaking in orbits, narrowing spirals, tangents that went nowhere, but continually talking, as if in fear of a moment of silence, a moment of contemplation. Talking to avoid thinking. I could see it on his face, but he kept talking. I thought of the black holes on the hospital floor.
He had already shifted onto the subject of his late wife, or rather his later late wife, and memories within memories, wheels within wheels. Her name was Kitty. I had grown up regarding her as my grandmother, but she was, in fact, no relation. She was my grandfather’s second wife and could not have children herself, but had come in and acted as a surrogate mother to nine kids who’d been robbed of their birth mother. In hindsight, she was just a troubled person who had been thrown into a situation that was beyond her capabilities. Nevertheless, she had fit the evil-stepmother role—designed for her perhaps in advance—rather well. She was prone to hysterical performative outbursts, throwing herself down the stairs, for instance. She kept padlocked a cupboard filled with Swiss rolls, chocolate, and biscuits. Perpetually hungry, the children managed to pick the lock and were caught only when they got carried away and didn’t thin the food down gradually. If they didn’t steal food, they went hungry, watching their otherwise beloved dog, Dino, be fed the leftover chicken and roast potatoes. Sometimes it was just thrown away, to teach them some deranged lesson. They joked about it years later, with genuine humor, but with that echo of pain that humor conceals and is often born from.
Kitty gave Anthony an alibi. It was Anthony who lay at the root of the problem. He had a rage in him and was intractable and narcissistic. His worldview did not extend far beyond his immediate desires. He was big too, and handy with his fists, provided it was to those junior to him, like his children. He’d have shat himself with an equal or better. He was clever, though, and he had idiosyncratic tendencies. Tyrannical power reserves the right to be arbitrary. It unbalances its victims. At times, he’d favor certain offspring at the expense of others (the older ones were particularly “blue-eyed”). At other times, his anger was more strategically chaotic, to divide and conquer, detaching itself from logic or cause and effect to keep them all second-guessing. You could get a hammering for peeling the potatoes too thick, or at other times too thin. The parameters were changed deliberately and without explanation so that nothing was safe and they were always kept in an unsettled state of anxiety.
At other times, punishment would be collective and disproportionate. He’d batter them with a strap at night when they were all in bed. They’d cower against the wall to escape the lashes, trying to push past one another, since the ones on the outside would take most of the force. Another method was to squeal loudest, in the hope he’d focus on the quiet ones. A lot of dysfunction begins as a form of functioning in desperate conditions.
Every word came with a welt. Every staccato syllable. “I’ll. Teach. You. To. Do. That. Again.” Threats were backed up with blunt force. “Don’t you dare turn a word in my mouth.” “I’ll take my hand off your face.” “By Christ, I’ll knock the fear of God into you.” Or alternatively, “I’ll beat the Jesus out of ye.” All with their own insane contradictory logic. Only once did I hear of him coming into conflict with someone approaching an equal. Even then, it was weighted to his advantage. He had been upstairs when an opportunist burglar had broken into the house. Anthony knew, from the sounds, it was a stranger. Rather than go down promptly, he stepped lightly onto the landing and took out the shillelagh, a huge blackthorn branch fashioned into a decorative, ordinarily ornamental cudgel. He tested its weight in his hands and then stepped back into the bedroom doorway, waiting for the steps on the stairs to reach the top, knowing—like the defender of a round tower—that to have the upper ground and a right-handed swing downward meant everything.
He paused, recounting the story.
“So … what happened?”
“Well … he didn’t tell me no more stories.”
I’d no idea what he meant. And he just left the recollection hanging cryptically there in the air. The shillelagh was mounted on the wall like a trophy. There was no doubt he could have handled himself; it was in the blood. His half brother boxed in his time. He once knocked an opponent out so early that the bookies insisted on bringing him round with smelling salts so that they could begin the fight again and not start a riot. On another occasion, he was on the warpath and a number of guards locked themselves in their own station and had to radio for help. My mother remembered him, oddly, as a gentle giant, who in opposition to Anthony used force only as a last resort. Whatever the real history was, or the real person, had fragmented into a series of contradictory stories.
Though he was proudly a teetotal “pioneer,” Anthony had met Kitty in a pub. He had called in for “a mineral,” as he used to put it. Anthony was a dry alcoholic. Little doubt about it. He didn’t touch a drop because his father was a mean drunk (“real bad,” people would say without elaborating). Anthony worshipped his mother as a saint. It only came out in recent times that she, too, was a heavy drinker. His parents would fish and take their catch to market in Derry on a horse and cart, in soaked bags of rushes under a tarp. They’d sell them off and return with enough money to go on drinking sprees that would last days, coming round just in time to begin the process again, maybe even fishing in the drink-sodden overlap. Anthony was largely raised by a stern puritanical aunt but was close enough to witness what was happening.
In contrast, Kitty, by her own admission, had been a good-time girl. She would brag to my sister and me about how she’d been invited onto the naval ships, “whistled on by the chief petty officer, no less,” beaming about her implied exploits. We were bemused. As teenagers, my mother and her sisters would do hysterical “rock the boat” motions behind her back, as she’d earlier reminisced to them, trying not to burst out laughing in her face. Notably Kitty remained in Derry, while many girls her age ended up in the States as the wives of marines. She no doubt felt that situation acutely.
It turned out that she was much younger than I had thought at the time. She hadn’t had an easy time of it. As a young woman, she’d cared for her aged mother and her blind sister until their deaths, and then for my grandfather’s children, but she had gone into freefall in her later years when I knew
her. She had high blood pressure and obesity, which showed as strain on her face. Her eyes bulged, her veins were pronounced. Her body looked as if it was straining heavily, simply to continue continuing. She reluctantly took enough tablets every day, handfuls of multicolored pills, to choke a horse. She dismissed the doctors who warned her about her diabetes, her hypertension, in order to continue as she saw fit, in terms of diet and lifestyle. She was an arch-skeptic of modern medical practice.
At the same time she was superstitious. The version of Catholicism to which she was wedded appeared to me, even as a child, as intensely kitsch. She had shrines everywhere, to Padre Pio, the Child of Prague, Our Lady of Guadalupe. She had never been anywhere abroad except Lourdes, but she’d been there many times. She’d talked about it as if it was not in France but a foreign enclave of Ireland. At that stage the pilgrimages to Knock, Fatima, Jerusalem, Medjugorje, Santiago de Compostela (sites of Marian apparitions and Christ hauntings) were done on bus and ferry rather than on foot. She would not live to see them all linked in a pilgrimage network of budget airlines three thousand feet in the heavens. Kitty’s pleasures always had a morbid, unearthly edge. She read obituaries in newspapers like they were horoscopes or poison-pen letters. “Aw, look here. Auld Agnes is dead, God bless her. I never could bring myself to like her.” Her idea of helping, in any situation, was to light a candle for you in the church. She thought of it as a technology to petition an invisible civil service of guardian-angel bureaucrats. Eventually, housebound and unable to make it to church, but still thinking nothing was wrong, she’d reach over and light the candles where she sat.
A Sacred Heart picture nailed to their living room wall glowed in neon red. It seemed to flicker and hum continually, as if a wire was loose and too much or too little electricity was reaching it. It was fed with three rosaries a day. Initially I was terrified that it was alive. My first crisis of faith came upon discovering that the pulsing Sacred Heart was not illuminated by some divine connection, but had a cord that led to the plug, the socket, and the switch. God evaporated that day. In hindsight, it was a cheap import from a factory where bored workers made shoddy miracles on conveyor belts. Its Christ looked like Barry Gibb. Kitty spoke of Jesus as “the most handsome man who had ever lived.” He was just one of many icons, Catholicism being polytheistic beneath the monotheistic image. Kitty took her religion as she took her tablets: a fix to counter her vices. In Germany they had Schluckbildchen, devotional pictures that worshippers swallowed.
Under her guidance, I began then to notice superstitions everywhere and all the time. People blessing themselves as ambulances passed. Holding their collars until they saw a dog. Never passing on stairs or under ladders. Broken mirrors and magpies and black cats. The fishermen had their own equivalents, never letting a priest, as Catholic as they were, on board the boats. Always take salt to sea, but never a watch. Always have an odd number of nets. Don’t mention anything to do with land life while at sea. These were believed, or at least not worth risking. Later one of my uncles told me that Kitty was not religious at all. She’d wanted to be, no doubt, and had probably convinced herself, but if you watched closely, it fell apart. Faith is made of more than simply belief. To Kitty, it was habit, ritual, and grounding. It was character. It filled gaps. Those things she believed in. God was incidental. It was no big thing. There’d been popes who hadn’t believed in God. As I grew older, such matters made me doubt my own atheism.
A copy of Leonardo’s The Last Supper commanded my grandparents’ bedroom. It always puzzled me how futuristic the room looked—strangely out of time. The original, painted on a wall with a flawed experimental method, has been crumbling away for centuries. A door was cut through it once; French revolutionaries hollowed out the apostles’ eyes, and the hall in which it was held was bombed to rubble by an Allied missile. Yet the version that looked over my grandparents’ room was airbrushed to a gaudy perfection. The disciples bulged in glossy three-dimensional relief. There was no patron saint of kitsch because all the saints were kitsch, at least in their holy-shop incarnations; all the trinkets and action figures and the plastic cherubs and ecstatic polystyrene monks. The strangeness of the actual lives of saints had been defused. It struck me that all the iconography was not a celebration but rather represented containment devices, as if the madness could be trapped in marble and glass, just as God could be contained in a cathedral and visited only once a week. It was a way of keeping them out of everyday life.
Kitty’s was a world where the sixties had not happened. She listened to Perry Como. She kept a collection of music boxes. I liked her, in defiance of prevailing opinion and despite myself, perhaps because parental and grandparental relationships are different. One night she woke up suddenly and began vomiting all over the walls. I remembered the horror of seeing my grandfather weeping at the resulting wake, “What will become of me now?” and thinking to myself that no one was asking what had become of her.
The much-vaunted Catholic virtue of mercy was lacking in Kitty and Anthony. One Sunday my mother and her sister, then teenagers, had lain in their beds as a silent protest instead of getting up and going to Mass. Anthony reacted with the nuclear option. It had only been a matter of time, given that he had found other excuses for each of his children to be propelled into the world. This gave him the excuse he wanted, and perhaps they knew it was time for them to leave, deep down. It was still unpleasant. He manhandled Ma and Caroline down the stairs, opened the front door, and launched them onto the path. There was a pause and then a huge teddy bear that my mother had won in a raffle came flying after them. The door slammed so hard it almost splintered the frame. They began the long walk into town, trailing the bear.
After crashing on sofas, my mother was taken in by a kindly trainee priest, who later lapsed, being perhaps too Christian for the profession and complaining of being continually sexually harassed by other priests and trainee priests in Maynooth. Even though Anthony had banished my mother, he would still call round on unannounced visits to make sure she wasn’t living in sin (he wasn’t ready to let go of his dictatorial position), and my da would have to climb out the window and sit out on the roof, smoking, until the coast had cleared. Nothing existed in my grandfather’s world without his express permission. His grip had been broken, however. It was a changed world. My parents had fun with their friends, enjoying their first taste of freedom, whenever they could. Playing music, putting up pictures, throwing parties on a budget, even flashing passing soldiers (“You’ll get tarred and feathered for entertaining the troops” went the gallows humor).
Eventually, in the late 1970s, my mother and father got their own place. As a teenager, my mother had been sitting at the back of a rickety country bus, smoking and staring out, daydreaming at the passing surroundings. They’d stopped to let a boy out at a blind corner. Another bus, roaring down the road, skidded into them. The glass shattered and the rear of the bus crumpled, her ankle along with it. She received compensation for the injuries, from which her father took a substantial portion for raising her. With the remainder she was able to buy a dilapidated council house between Rosemount and the Glen, but a house nonetheless, in the days when they were affordable. When she and my father moved in, my grandfather, fuming but powerless to stop them, had her banished from the family. When my parents married, they went to the local Chinese restaurant for their reception and could afford only starters. Ma’s brothers and sisters were banned from attending, but Tony had escaped and turned up, beaming and wearing a duffel coat. Not long afterward he, too, was kicked out, after returning one of Anthony’s punches. He’d been hit a welt that had left him seeing stars and had instinctively lunged back. My grandfather was outraged and stunned into momentary silence, then he began stammering and built up into threats that he’d call the police and the priests, and what was this world coming to that the young would strike their elders? Tony brushed past him, barely able to look at him, hurling a few choice insults. He made his way to London, sleeping on park bench
es back in the old “No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish” days. Expected to sink, he learned to swim.
Even when time eroded the divide, Da and Anthony never got on. It was inevitable, with their temperaments—Anthony all sound and fury, signifying nothing, and my father a stoic with a certain militant streak. Irresistible force meets immovable object. Both stubborn in their ways, as I am too. When first introduced, Anthony had said nothing, then when Da left, he raged and fumed that Ma had married someone unbefitting of their status, which was practically nonexistent and thus important. He was an inveterate social climber, a skinflint who was mean enough to turn the engine of his car off when going downhill to save money, and who insinuated that he had a miserly fortune stashed away. Da was a godless heathen who could barely mumble the Angelus, the daily method by which the last professional Catholics marked the passing of time. He was an eternally curious agnostic. Added to this, the Church disapproved of long hair, beards, and poverty. So Anthony disowned his daughter and her children, my sister and me, returning only when I made it to grammar school and became useful in his ever-downward clamber upward in society.
Compass
Anthony used to say, “You people on land,” as if he were a different species or one of the elect. He knew the coastlines intimately, from the sea’s perspective, when the rest barely realized they were on an island at all: “You don’t understand the lie of the land below the waves.” There’s another world down there. It isn’t flat or singular. There are clefts, valleys, plateaus, chasms, and caves. He could visualize the landscape down there with a mapmaker’s accuracy, as if the rivers and oceans had drained away and revealed the land beneath—new unfamiliar countries. He was convinced that is what took the dead so long to come back up. It was as if he believed they got lost down there.
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