The strangest thing wasn’t the places that were gone, altered, or disguised, but rather the buildings that remained, which hadn’t changed yet still felt somehow unreal to me. As if they’d been replaced by exact replicas in an unaired episode of The Twilight Zone. It had not been very long, but I had walked, it seemed, into a facsimile of the past. The bowling alley had the same gigantic ten-pin on its roof. The Guildhall still had its glowing clock face, verdigris-copper cone, and golden weathervane. It was all there in front of me, but I could never again see it as I once had. I knew few people in the pubs in which I holed up in dimly lit corners, and those I did recognize glanced at me with silent, furtive acknowledgment, as if we had committed some terrible crimes together once in the past—crimes I could not recall and of which neither of us wished to speak. It was not the buildings or the place that had changed, but me, through age and absence. The pub filled and the drink kicked in, but apart from ordering the perpetual “same again” and nodding to the barmaid as she lit the candle, lodged in the empty wine bottle on the table, I said nothing to anyone. Weary of both love and promiscuity, I kept my own company. Where to begin was difficult. Where to begin again nearly impossible.
I spent my days walking, searching for things in space that had most likely been irretrievably lost in time. I found, to paraphrase an old Camus book that I’d unearthed from my teenage stash, that in the depths of summer, there was in me an unconquerable winter.
Once or twice I would chance upon old school friends and would read in their faces their surprise at how I’d aged. They’d talk about the good old days, and I’d quietly nod along with a half-smile. Nostalgia seemed a fiction you tell yourself, and I was never a good enough storyteller to believe my own fictions. Someone had some old photographs on their phone. I didn’t keep any myself. It was interesting; we all appeared to be getting increasingly young in the photographs. I stayed long enough to return the round politely and then make my excuses and move on to the next pub, hoping they didn’t follow. When the bell rang for last orders, and the bouncers did their rounds, and the bars slowly emptied, I’d watch the last drunken stragglers melt away in the rain and would find myself always at the quayside. I gazed down from the bridge, dropping bottles into the water to see how they navigated the currents off into the darkness. There was something hypnotic about the river. Looked at from afar, it was a huge mass of water, dark and glacial, complete and permanent. Yet the closer you looked, the more transient it appeared: every bit of it—all the swirls and currents that shimmied on the surface and glitched the reflections of the lights. Rivers exist in deep geological time and yet they are forever restarting.
The morning after the wake, I woke hungover. I slunk downstairs and sensed there was something wrong with the silence. I asked.
“Robert’s boy is missing. Andrew. They found his belongings on the bridge.”
Wallet, Keys, Mobile Phone
Disappearing completely is not an easy task. You can try to step out of your life, but life holds on. Everywhere we go, we leave traces. We are shades on CCTV, time stamps on bank withdrawals, coordinates on phone signals to satellites. To disappear completely now takes effort, skill, a technological Indian rope trick. It is far easier to die than to disappear. No one saw Andrew vanish. The things he left behind—his wallet, keys, and mobile phone—were ominous, given how crucial they were to modern existence. I paused at the bridge on which they were found, thinking of those missed calls and unread texts transmitting through the atmosphere.
I stopped to tighten the laces on my boots. My father was already across the road, up ahead by the ruined gatehouse. He began walking on when I’d almost reached him.
I followed, purposeful as a stray dog, and thought of things to talk about, to pass the time and distract us: music, the woods, the birds, the jet trails of a long-vanished plane high above us, the pale ghost of the moon in the sky. In the end, I said nothing. We climbed over the cold clasp of the metal cattle-fence and onto the path, wet as sculptor’s clay, then through the brambles, parallel to the field and down, down into the thicket that descended to the river. The path was frozen at its shadows and set at a treacherous angle, the sidings thick with thorns. I pulled my sleeves down over my hands and walked, attempting to test the firmness of the ground without dropping pace, once or twice almost losing my footing, heart momentarily stopping in a brief jolt of adrenaline. My father seemed unaffected, striding ahead until I had lost sight of him completely through the briars, which swallowed up the way forward after he’d passed. I could still hear him singing. It suited him, the wildness. He belonged, it seemed, to an earlier time. There was something innately pagan about him, more suited to the days when every corner of the landscape had its own small god.
When he reached the clearing and sea level, my father was already staring into the mid-distance, scanning the river’s silver skin. Da didn’t notice my watching him. When I was young and could glance unseen, I would study the map of his face. It was full of character, weather-beaten from working outside in countless seasons as a gardener-groundsman for the council. He’d become even more Lincolnesque with age. His long straggles of hair were grayer and thinner, but still a statement. His tattoos a little more faded with his sleeves rolled up, but still prominent, inescapable. He still dressed with admirable disdain for convention: a prospector’s waistcoat, Gypsy scarves, Chelsea boots. There was a traveling fair somewhere missing a member. Always quiet and self-contained, he had a certain fatalism that had recently become pronounced in him. He seemed suddenly vulnerable, after years—decades—of appearing elementally solid. He had not taken to age well, which was surprising, even unsettling. You spent your youth wanting to escape your home and living away, and then in middle age you get the sudden, terrifying realization that your parents won’t be around forever, or even for that much longer. Something had put the fear into my father—maybe it was mortality or the past—and it shook me too, though I said nothing of it. What could he be thinking, now that he was returning, once again, to retrieve the dead from the river?
And yet in moments like this, bounding over the slick rocks and rivulets, he looked like his old self again. I thought of the times when, as a child, I used to try, through sheer willpower, by concentrating intently, to make time slow down, come to a halt and finally reverse, but the clocks kept ticking and time flowed on regardless, and us with it.
We emerged from the trees to a part of the river called the Narrows. As we stepped down off the bank, the riparian edge of the woodland gave way to shingle, which whispered under our boots. The gravity of the moon had dragged the river down, and the things it contained were left behind, scattered as detritus. It looked like the scene of a catastrophe, one that had happened impossibly long ago. I kicked through the wreckage. Rusted cans. Collapsed lobster cages. The jawbone of an animal, bleached white.
The Armada had washed up not far from here. Splintered galleons, the pride of imperial Spain, turned into flotsam and jetsam on a merciless shore, their names lost now in time, their bodies (those that were found, at least) looted for keepsakes. And now they had returned, the descendants of the plunderers, to beachcomb again for the drowned. “Where are you, Andrew?” I thought. “Just give me a sign and we’ll take you home.”
We scanned the slipstreams of the river, together but separate. It was odd to be searching for something—someone—I didn’t want to find. The mind played tricks. Here and there I’d see a darker patch on the surface or breakers hitting rocks, signs of riptides and eddies, and swear there was something there, something that resembled a silhouette, but the kid remained hidden. What would we find? It was not worth thinking about, yet you inevitably did. What were the boy’s immediate family going through? For all the well-worn formalities of the newspaper appeals and police reports, it was the stuff of nightmares and yet, as little as I knew him, Andrew did not belong to nightmares.
The wind began to pick up. Somewhere in a slow, silent dance of water and half-light, I was drifting and
we could not find him. The river was mute. Across the expanse, factories were silently pumping artificial clouds into a sky mirrored on the water.
My father was farther down the beach, surveying the horizon through binoculars. I began to kick through the dreck left in the wake of successive tides, looking for clues—anything really. Streamers of knotted wrack seaweed cloaked the rocks, from mustard fronds to onyx barbs and bladders. I recited their names in my head, learned in childhood yet still curiosities: wing kelp and sea whistle, oyster thief and dead man’s bootlaces, peacock’s tail, sea oak, landlady’s wig, dillisk and black carrageen. They looked like the fossilized tendrils of an alien race, because they had come from an alien world. What did that world make of the strange periodic visitors from the surface, floating and then falling down into this other universe?
It was a fearful realm to contemplate. The depths of the Foyle had long unsettled me, even when, as children, we toyed at its edges, knowing we shouldn’t. A world of monsters was concealed from us by the water’s chrome surface and by the rationing of light in its depths, but you’d get occasional glimpses. The slick devils of eels that we hooked by accident, all teeth and black oil. Eating blind fish around the sewage pipes. The rats we hissed and threw stones at, darting along at right angles beneath the dock pilings. The eyeless things powered wholly by instinct.
Yet the water in the shallows was crystalline. I reached down and let it run through my fingers. Though it was the depths of winter, it was still colder than expected. I tried to imagine the shock to the system, upon going suddenly under; how long it would take for the body temperature to drop, for the muscles to seize up, for energy to ebb away, hoping it was mercifully quick. I remembered foolishly diving into the sea while camping once, too early in the year, and how my lungs shrank to the size of a walnut in a fraction of a thought, and, winded, I barely struggled to the shore. It was the cold that got you, they said. That and the undercurrents.
Two friends of mine were sitting, smoking on a pier once. A car drove up and the driver just sat there, gazing at the sea. Thousand-yard stare. They watched him as he watched it. Then suddenly he hit the accelerator and launched the car off the edge. It belly flopped onto the waves and, much quicker than expected, tilted and slid down into the depths, its taillights disappearing into the murk. My friends sat there, dumbfounded. Seconds later the driver burst to the surface gasping, “Jesus, lads, it’s fucking freezing.” Maybe it’s an urban myth or a memory or a memory of a myth, but it has the ring of truth.
The river was deceptive at this point in its meanderings. Three steps in and you’d suddenly plummet downward. They’d kept Allied submarines down there, hidden in the unseen fathoms. There were still traces of its past military life along the shore. For a better view, I clambered up onto a man-made parapet of concrete sandbags, grazing my palms against the rough surface. At the end of the last world war, the Nazi U-boat fleet, having surfaced and surrendered as far north as Norway and as far south as Spain, had been gathered here. The crews, stunned that their thousand-year Reich had lasted only twelve years before obliteration, stunned that they were somehow still alive, were taken off into custody, while their vessels—116 submarines—were towed out into open waters northwest of Ireland and scuttled. Operation Deadlight it was called. Along the ocean floor are iron rooms rusting and transforming into coral, in an unseen sea change.
In the cold war that followed, Derry was reputedly designated a nuclear target by the Soviet Union and would have received a payload fifty times the power of the Fat Man and Little Boy atom bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The aim would be to knock out the naval yards and the submarine trenches, incinerating or irradiating the city in the process. Standing at the docks, looking north along the river toward the sea, I wondered how long would pass—seconds, milliseconds—before the heat and the blast wave hit. I wondered what would be left. Silhouettes flashbulbed onto whatever stone remained standing. This local tragedy would, of course, go virtually unnoticed in the wider world, given that Moscow, Berlin, Washington, and hundreds of other cities would be sequentially seared from the face of the earth. I thought of figures out at sea or up on the hills, by the ancient stone sun fort of Grianán of Aileach, gazing down, shielding their eyes as a second sun appeared in the sky and a boiling tower, built from what was once a city, rose into the sky. I thought of the eerie silence when telegraph and radio operators couldn’t contact the entire city of Hiroshima.
The BBC planned for such eventualities, with prerecorded messages to be relayed to those lucky or unlucky enough to have survived, in the reassuring Received Pronunciation of the continuity announcer, whether he was still alive or dead: “Stay tuned to this wavelength, stay calm and stay in your own house. Remember there is nothing to be gained by trying to get away. By leaving your homes, you could be exposing yourself to greater danger.” It was a message for those homes that, by blind luck or topography, still remained. Clouds of radiated smoke and debris of what was once Derry would join what was once Belfast and begin to drift northeast over the sea, to the Scottish islanders struggling to get a signal on their radios, wondering what the ominous glows on the horizon were.
Among my earliest memories was being carried on my father’s shoulders at the front of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marches, walking beside my mother and aunts, all of them in hippie kaftans. There was a black-and-white photograph on the cover of the local paper of one such parade in which we were discernible, crossing the river on the top deck of the Craigavon Bridge. Banners bearing messages like “Protest and Survive,” “Refuse Cruise,” “Ban the Bomb.” Years later, as a cocky youth, I’d casually jibe my folks and ask if Northern Ireland had become an irradiated wasteland, how would they tell the difference? My mother answered seriously, with an unexpected reproachful wistfulness, that many nights she lay awake, thinking the apocalypse could come at any second, and would gather up my infant sister and me in her arms through the night to have us with her, just in case the four-minute warning had already been given and the nukes were on their way. As it happened, the end of the world failed to occur, for them at least, but the mushroom cloud cast a long shadow over many lives. It was only later that I became aware that her fear of the bomb, however looming and all-encompassing, was just the surface—a totem. Something else was shadowing her; not the colossal destruction of nuclear annihilation, which wipes out entire cities in seconds, but the creeping death that seeps into families on days when everything is normal for everyone else. The death of her mother had given her a sense of doom and gloom. Trying to shield her children ran the risk of un-armoring us in the process.
The earth was charred on top of the lookout from a long-extinguished bonfire; springs like metal orbits unwound from incinerated tires. The ruins of a building, the roof fallen in, stood farther upriver. Another was completely shrouded in ivy and other plants, a cube of abundant forest, with only a window in the green revealing that it was man-made. A foul-tempered goat had once made its home there and had chased me out onto the rocks, but it had long since vanished, leaving silver fleece tangled on the wire.
My grandfather Anthony would have known how to read the river, how to find the boy. The shallow turbulence of the riffle, the signs of pockets of depth, how the river speeds at certain points.
The sun had begun to sink in the sky, and the light was changing. A chill had entered the air, and I turned up my collar against the wind. My father suggested coming back in the morning, given that our chances of seeing anything now were slim. I agreed, but said I’d stay on, clear my head, take the air. My father nodded and turned and walked away, singing as he went. Da was always singing. I remembered a scene from Kurosawa’s film Rashomon. The rain forever falling as the desperate huddled under the refuge of a crumbling gate in a country falling to pieces. “We all want to forget something,” one of them said, “so we tell stories. It’s easier that way.” Songs were Da’s stories.
I propped myself up next to the green lighthouse and to
ok my hip flask from my coat pocket and watched as my father disappeared up through the trees. I took a swig and leaned my head against the stone. Sunlight splintered through the canopy in the near distance. I closed my eyes for the briefest of moments and felt the warmth on my face, a lizard saving up the heat from a distant star before the night comes. It would get cold soon, and dark, but the least I could do, having failed Andrew when we last met, was to sit with him awhile.
Dusk exploded in slow motion, the stars already appearing through a sky on fire. Should I feel guilty to see beauty at such a time? It appeared to me like a painting by Turner or Titian, the palette changing by the minute. Ruby of arsenic, copper patina, Egyptian blue, Schloss green, chrome yellow, spirit of Saturn, orpiment, vermilion, cinnabar, and cadmium—all the poisonous pigments that drove artists into madness and the early grave. But what sunsets they painted! I wondered if anyone else was watching this as it carried on around the curve of the planet.
There was a story of a lady leaving Derry for America. Inconsolable, she had turned around for one last look at her birthplace and saw the silhouette of a man hanging from the gallows, framed against an exquisite sky. I struggled to remember who had told it (Steinbeck perhaps?), passed down as it was from generation to generation, but memory is a slippery fickle thing. It would have been this direction, on this river. I sat there drinking, and the light slowly seeped through the dusk and then ebbed away, until all that was left were stars and questions, endless constellations of questions.
Ballast
I walked all night, walked myself sober, looking for anything in the river—any sign. The morning was the color of cobalt. Frozen tire marks traced over and over one another like a charcoal sketch of cathedral arches on the ice. Winter asphalt Gothic patterns that the sun would soon erase. Across the fields of frost, that same pale sun finally emerged. This far north, this deep into winter, day comes fleetingly, like an afterthought, an accident of light and geometry.
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