Cautious because of his knowledge, Anthony stuck to what he knew, clinging to the coastline wherever he could and wherever it was safe to do so, venturing farther out under necessity alone. Curious about his incuriosity, I asked him once about places farther away. If he’d ever been tempted to sail off into what he’d called, with a hint of derision, “the blue beyond”? “Did you ever hear of Londonderry Island? It’s in Tierra del Fuego. The land of fire. It was—”
Anthony stopped me with a look that suggested I was a gibbering maniac. After a pause, he reanimated with pantomime bluster. “Sure, what the fuck business would I have there?” He thudded the breakfast tray for emphasis.
I stared at the ceiling. “Fair point.”
Anthony had no use for tales of the Horse Latitudes or the Doldrums or the Maelstrom, of sailors dressing as Neptune crossing the equator, or Hong Kong junks, or the genius of Polynesian navigation. He knew nothing of the mechanics of haloclines or that the sea was blue because the other color wavelengths were absorbed. All that mattered was finding the shoals and returning to land in one piece. He had a contract with the sea and to go further, to think foolish thoughts, would be a betrayal, a broken covenant. It would chance fate. This was not an idle game.
And yet he must have dreamt, knowing of places of threat and plenty, places he let slip in conversation—the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, the Nantucket Shoals—and even further, places that must exist in some dream world out of reach: the Cape of Good Hope, Deception Island, the Bimini Road, Bouvet Island, the Great Blue Hole. The matters he discussed were particular and practical. How two ships, having a certain gravity, will always collide if left near one another in a calm sea. How to “brace in” or “chapel” boats. Carrying the helm amidships in baffling breezes and raging gales. He was too busy surviving to entertain much wondering, too busy trying not to imagine horrors to imagine wonders. Faith was a kind of silencing for Anthony. It did not invite thoughts, surprise, memories, or the chance of being wrong. It kept guilt away. It enabled blustering certainty in the guise of modesty. Certainty was his wreck and certainty was his raft. As long as he could stay sure, the past could not catch up with him.
What he knew, he knew well. How to find his way back, by internal radar. The routine of the catch, by muscle memory. How to spot land when no land is in sight, from signs in clouds, water, or, like Columbus, coastal birds. The deceptive and revealing angles of light on the sea’s surface. He knew the feel of the water, the landscape of the sea, with eyes closed: surge and sway, heave and yaw, roll and pitch. The trade winds and trade routes, where they mattered. Abrupt headlands and inviting but treacherous coves. Nothing if not superstitious, he would sail to Killybegs annually for the Blessing of the Boats to bask in heavenly protection for another year, vaccinated by the Holy Spirit against drowning.
He and his crew would sail around and between the isles of Donegal—Eighter Island and Inishcoo, abandoned in the 1960s. The “island of the white cow,” Inishbofin, and the green cloak of Glashedy, with its huge cliffs and a surreal pasture on top. The “island of the hollow beach,” Inishtrahull, and the red Oileán Ruaidh, formerly the “island of the prisoners” (identity unknown). There was mystery in the places we thought we knew, if you looked closely enough. Some were hard to reach or to dock at, fit only for passing or for guano; or for pilgrimages, in the case of Inishkeel, or refuge from pursuers in the more remote islands. They multiplied as if Ireland were shattering at the edges. Gola Island off Gweedore, Torglass Island off Gola, each island smaller and more rugged than the last, some dangerously concealed for sailors, others concealed enough to be sanctuaries during the successive invasions. The inlets in sea cliffs they call “zawns” were places to hide in the shadow of natural castle walls and to beach illicit cargoes. There were accidental bridges leading out onto wave-lashed rocks, half-collapsed buttresses and stacks, like Gothic ruins.
No one could ever be sure why Anthony took to his bed. He hadn’t really lost his spirit. He could still give out hell, and for a long time commanded the family even when confined, trying to play one off the other through poison phone calls and calculated asides. Though he had been hobbling, it was a very sudden deterioration, and his inactivity only seemed to make the problem irrecoverable. Idly drinking coffee by the window one morning, I watched him limping along, using a walking stick with a handle, smooth and rounded as the heel of a Lourdes statue, and then I watched him run for a bus when he thought he might miss it and no one was looking. There was something performative in it all initially, until it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. You only ever destroy yourself, someone wrote. My grandfather could walk, but simply gave it up one day, as if under the influence of some diabolical counsel in his head that he’d mistaken for good advice. Eventually his newfound passivity—inertia—would kill him. Maybe even he didn’t know the answer why. Maybe there wasn’t a single answer, more of a dialogue that he decided to spectate at, even though it was his own life.
There was a tradition in early Christian Ireland of holy men setting off in boats without oars, to go wherever fate decided, never to be heard of again. You placed yourself in God’s hands and at the sea’s mercy. Later it became a punishment for those who had killed their brothers, an execution without spilling blood. They’d be sent out oar-less, tied to the boat, never to return or to be mentioned again. Where they went, no one knew or asked.
My grandfather had another brother, or rather a half brother. They shared the same father. He’d kept to himself and was known as something of an odd character. Anthony had learned that he was not faring too well, so he’d gone to visit him at his home in Quigley’s Point, a stopping place along the Foyle shore. He found him there alone, gripping the blankets of his bed, prematurely old and already dying, between peeling wallpapers. It was the only night he spent there. Anthony remembered there were holes in the roof, letting in the elements. He noticed you could see the stars.
My grandfather told me this the last time I saw him, bedbound in his own starless room. He was talking and then he suddenly sat up, mid-conversation, and looked at me as if he’d just noticed me. He was not himself. Becoming less himself, but who or what he was becoming instead, I did not know. It unnerved me but I did not react, for fear of alarming him further. Instead, I shook his hand and embraced him and told him everything was all right, and to take care of himself and that I’d come back to see him. Except, of course, I did none of these things. I left him almost as he was talking, telling myself that I’d say these things next time. Little did I know that we had already run out of next times. The fog took him, too, along with our unsaid things. Age undoes all, at least for the lucky ones who make it that far. Then life just carries on without a person. Even meaningless objects remain. Anthony would have stopped the entire world when his life stopped, if he could. I’m certain of it. His last words, with hilariously extravagant misanthropy, were, “You’re all just a shower of bastards.” He had the tyrant in him, unquestionably. And yet I missed him.
I left, and not long afterward, my grandfather drowned in that airtight room.
All that is left of my grandfather’s memory are the things he passed on, now that he has gone into the soil and is reduced to bones, the network of nerves and electricity in his brain shut down, area by area, like a city trying to conceal itself in the night.
Naval Insignia
Anthony kept a photograph of his younger brother Charlie, not on direct display, not framed, behind an ornament on the cabinet, but still there. Visible yet partially hidden, in some hierarchy that only he was party to. They looked almost like twins, except that his brother had chosen the open seas and signed up for the merchant navy. He was wearing his uniform in the photo. Spotlessly white. He was on board long enough to make able seaman in the deck department of several vessels. It was a hard life. On shore leave, he had recounted to Anthony an incident he’d seen on watch one night. Some of the sailors were playing cards, unwinding by escalating the tension, and an English fellow was b
eating a Scot, horribly so, in front of everyone. “He made an example of him. Laughing while he did it. Took a month’s wages. The guy didn’t know when he was beat.” Eventually the Scot snapped and took a swing for the other. The cards and the chips went everywhere, and eventually the scuffle was broken up and it all died down. Or they thought it had. A razor was hidden in the back of a cap, and one of them pulled it out and you could see the sudden glint as he lunged at the face. Poor bastard lost an eye in one fell stroke. The crew beat the guy to within an inch of his life in retaliation. “They danced on his head,” Anthony remembered his brother saying, word for word. The military police carted him away. They roughed him up so badly he ended up mentally disabled, according to Charlie.
Charlie looked simultaneously proud and lost in the photo, gazing somewhere beyond the camera. He was not destined to live long. That much was certain. Anthony had no reluctance about speaking of him and his early death, but the circumstances changed every time he related it to a new person. He had told my mother, cryptically, that Charlie had been “hit by a lift.” He told my aunt Anne that Charlie had fallen into the dry dock of a harbor. I wondered if there was some sliver of truth in either tale, some surrogate story where he had been injured or someone else had died, and Anthony had passed it off for ease of mind, to himself as much as other people. Fiction was easier to absorb than inconvenient painful truths. Suspension of disbelief was easier than the demands made by the factual.
When the contradictions came to light, however, people started to pry. The great secret, the source of shame, for a devout Catholic at least, was that Charlie had committed suicide in his late twenties. He had knelt on the tiles of his London digs and laid his head on a dishcloth in the gas oven. It’s not known whether he had left contact details for Anthony, but the authorities managed to get in touch through Bernie, my aunt. Charlie lived in Holland Park, that much was remembered. It turned out that he had married the love of his life and, having set off for sea for an extended period, returned to find that his bride was pregnant by another man. Upon learning this, Charlie’s photograph seemed to change. He had become a tragic figure—if not a martyr, then certainly one instilled with melancholy and retrospective doom. A lost, and wronged, soul. The knowledge that he would be betrayed and ruined, and would never grow much older than he was in that photo, invested the image with a terrible haunting resonance. He became our familial patron saint of heartbreak. The weight of other people’s experiences hung ungainly around his neck.
Much later, it would become apparent that the information they’d received was inaccurate. It was in fact Charlie who had cheated. He had gotten a teenage girl pregnant and, unable or unwilling to face a problematic future, had checked out. The saintly appearance of the photo would require another overhaul, and yet again it had not changed one iota. It remained exactly the same, as the dead do, while we the viewers are in flux. Anthony had traveled, in his best suit, alone to England to identify and retrieve his brother’s body. I wondered what he was thinking on that ferry there and back.
In the days when he had rowed out on the lough, Anthony had approached a British four-funneled destroyer with sacks filled with contraband, as he had done many times before. He shouted up to the chief mate or the watch officer (the time of day or night goes undescribed), “Permission to approach the vessel?” and the usual haggling began. Reaching into a bag, Anthony was momentarily stopped in his tracks.
“Hey, McMonagle! Would you ever wind your fucking neck in?” went one recollection of the call. In another version he shouted, “McMonagle, are you up to no good?” Either way, Anthony heard someone calling him by name. He froze and turned to gaze upward, shielding his eyes, to see.
“How are ye doing, anyways?” the voice continued.
For once Anthony held his tongue, thrown by the voice. Eventually he let out, irritated by even saying it, “How do you know me?”
“None of your business, but I know you all right.”
It was then that he recognized his brother’s voice.
Charlie had vanished off to sea and somehow returned. What were the chances? They talked, the other sailors giving them a little space, but Anthony was unable to get on and Charlie was unable to get off. So they shouted back and forth. “I hadn’t seen him in years,” my grandfather admitted later.
Anthony told him to wait there. His heart was pounding and he set off rowing to the shore. He ran all the way home, bursting into the house, breathless with news for his parents that Charlie was back, rousing them to go see him. His parents were instantly dismissive. He begged them to come, but they fobbed him off. There would always be another time.
When you went away then, you went away for good. It was like grief. Families regularly undertook, for those setting off on the transatlantic crossing, what was called an “American wake” because they knew—regardless of success or otherwise—they’d never hear from, or even of, their loved ones ever again. Even London swallowed people up forever. Not a phone call, not a postcard. Yet his parents would not budge, even as Anthony pleaded with them.
It goes unrecorded whether he, or they, ever saw Charlie alive again.
Revolver
One day, long before I was born, my uncle Tony, who specialized from an early age in delinquency as a fine art, came home with a spring in his step. His God-fearing patriarch father, suspicious of any signs of joy, followed him through the house as Tony whooped and hollered like a cowboy, grabbing him hard by the wrist and shaking until he dropped what he was holding. It was a rusting revolver. Anthony was incandescent with rage, cursing, threatening to deal with his son later, before taking the revolver quickly and covertly—like it was a terrible omen that would curse the house by its presence—past the checkpoint’s glare, down the lane, and launching it as far as he could into the river. It sank like other secrets into the depths, where it remains. Perhaps he was right: perhaps it was an omen, given what was to come.
PART FOUR
The Liminal Place
Nail
After Kitty died, my family left Cedar Street for the suburbs, or rather a council estate that was marooned in the sticks, a stone’s throw from the river, the place where my mother had grown up. The idea was to be close to my grandfather to help look after him, which was like moving into a web to look after a giant spider. The area was waiting to become the suburbs, but was ten years from doing so. Not part of the city yet, or of the countryside anymore. Suspended animation. The streetlights petered out long before the estate, so it was surrounded by darkness. My mother had been wanting to move out of town for some time, convinced that Cedar Street was going to hell in a handcart. Drunks had wrenched the guttering off their wall, and on another occasion smashed the back window of the tiny Renault 5 that she and Da had finally saved up to buy. Building work had stirred up the earth and caused an influx of rodents. A bristling rat in the attic, keeping us awake at night, was the last straw. So we left. The excuse was to help a grief-stricken Anthony, keep an eye on him and make sure “he didn’t do anything silly,” so they moved into a house recently vacated.
The local teenagers took umbrage at my presence from the beginning. The distance from my old gang was insurmountable in those pre-digital days, with a haphazard bus trundling past once in a blue moon. I watched the local youngsters in the fields. They’d buy beat-up old cars from scrap dealers in order to run them into the ground. The fields were like spirographs of deep mud tracks. Then they’d sit around in the carcass when it finally gave up the ghost, before a fiery Viking funeral. The younger ones would gather up golf balls from the rough and sell them back to golfers. I let my shyness get the better of me, and the brief window of opportunity was missed. And I didn’t endear myself by hanging around alone or with the local girls, for whom I was a novel, and not unwilling, plaything.
Once, I foolishly invited old school friends over. They were trouble at the best of times, but I thought a change of scenery would be good. What badness could they get up to in the middle of now
here? They arrived drunk, and at the first sign of provocation from the locals—an offensive remark, idly cast—it all kicked off. Before I knew it, there were scuffles and they chased the estate lads back into one of their houses, and their older brothers suddenly piled out en masse and there was a mad dash for the main road, chest bursting and muscles aching, giddy with adrenaline, until I realized, with the rest of the group running on, the laughter dying down, that we were two boys short; and reluctantly, cursing myself and them, I peeled back to see where they were. My friend Bobby was already unconscious, jaw broken, and Ciaran was being held by both arms as they laid into him. He was taunting them as they did so: “Is that all you’ve got?” I knew we were out of our depth, so I burst into our house and got my parents. They carried Bobby in, roaring at the locals, and cleaned him up, my mum’s hand trembling with rage and nerves, but it was obviously bad, so he was carted off to hospital. We ended up being called to court—a day out of school in suits too big for us. Bobby never hung around with us again.
My father tried to do stuff for the local kids to ease the tensions. He got the council to put in goalposts for them, but they soon pulled the nets down, swinging on them. He carried on, planting saplings and making the area green. I watched him when he worked, digging and planting. Every time a child was born to someone in our family, my father would plant an oak tree. He said it was so the children could see how it grew alongside them, and outgrew them as they got older, and how it would live for centuries, invested with something of them. “There are oaks here that are ancient. With a bit of luck, this will still be growing here in three hundred years’ time. Mature for another three hundred. Then die away for three hundred. We’ll be gone almost a thousand years.” Three hundred years ago, Blackbeard the pirate sailed on the seas, Voltaire and Swift were writing, Jacobites were losing their heads. There was a Holy Roman Empire. Colonel John Mitchelburne flew the crimson flag from St. Columb’s Cathedral steeple in Derry, twenty-five years after the Siege, before forming the Apprentice Boys club. Three hundred years before that, the black death still raged. The Prague “heretics” were being burned at the stake. Joan of Arc was a child, and the people of Rouen were eating their pets, besieged by the English. Three hundred years before that was the First Crusade. All in the life of an oak.
Inventory Page 20
