by Dermot Healy
“She would.”
“She’s only thinking of what’s best for me.” She lifted a cigarette and looked at him. She took a can of lager from the table. “I could have a good life in Dublin.”
“I’m sure you could.”
“I’m certain I could. And I could find someone there to look after me.”
“Well,” he said bitterly, “you go to Dublin and I’ll go to Belmullet.”
“I might,” she said, “we’ll have to see.”
“I’m serious,” she said.
“I know.”
“Should I make myself scarce?” interrupted Christopher.
“Oh, no,” said Catherine. “You pair should just sit there and listen to the music. Meanwhile, can I have a vodka?”
“You certainly can,” said Nolan. He levered himself out of the armchair and stood bemused in the middle of the floor. He poured out a small measure and handed it to her. “Cheers!” He rose his drink in the air.
“So you’re going,” she said.
“I heard from Thady,” said Jack. “There’s a berth available.”
“When are you going?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Well, thanks for telling me.”
“You can follow me down.”
“Are you sure we can be together there?” asked Catherine.
“I can’t see why not,” he said.
“And you’ll find a home for us?”
“I will.”
“So that’s it then, I suppose,” she said sadly. She looked over at Christopher Nolan. “He’s deserting me.”
When he woke in the morning he found himself on the bathroom floor. The ex-soldier was asleep on the sofa. Catherine was sitting in a chair in the bedroom. She was wide awake and smoking. He leaned down and kissed her. She didn’t speak. He took the bus to Enniskillen, and from there to Ballina. It was when he had at last passed the musical bridge at Bellacorrick that he knew he was back in Erris.
When Jack set down his bag in Thady’s house and looked out on Mullet it was like he’d just come down the stairs for the first time after a long illness. He spent a few idle days waiting while the boats were re-equipped after the flatfish season ended and before the salmon season began. The first few days of late May he sat on the steps of Thady’s house looking out on the dunes, and he was overwhelmed by simple, selfish things.
It was as if Catherine had never existed. He was glad to have escaped. He felt shamefully free. When he opened the pages he had written in Belfast it was like opening the lid of a coffin. Inside a body was putrefying. He put the pages by for again.
He’d take a cup of tea and step outside. Then he’d lie in his bed in Thady’s house dreading the moment when Thady would return to tell him the hour that they would be casting off from the pier.
He dreamt up outlandish excuses: I’m sick, I can’t, the backs of my legs are fucked, there’s no way I’ll face a day out there. Thady returned near midnight and said nothing. Jack fell into a deep sleep. Next morning at five he found himself stumbling round the dark house in Thady’s wake.
“Keep moving,” said the older man.
“I’m moving,” replied Jack.
“Good man.”
A little while later they walked down the grey pier at Ballyglass which was full of scolding seagulls and silent fishermen. Hugh drove up in a blue Toyota.
The Blue Cormorant, a steel forty-footer, worked out of Killalla. Jack brought with him new sea gear, a number of notebooks which he wrapped in cellophane, a pair of boots he’d bought in Lavell’s and a pair of new, tough jeans.
The Blue Cormorant steamed out from Killalla with the grey, illegal multi-filament salmon nets stored in her hold. As they hauled the first net in beyond Achill Island a shark skidded by below the winch. A salmon that came up with the net was cut perfectly straight across the middle with one clean bite. The skipper ran to stern with his rifle, but the shark had gone.
“Fucking bastard,” he said.
Later that day a playful seal rose beside the shore buoy. The skipper shot it straight through the heart.
“Fucking seals,” he said.
“If you’re going to shoot seals,” said Jack, “you can count me out of this crew.”
“What are you,” roared the skipper, “some kind of environmentalist?”
“He’s right,” replied a Northerner, who was hauling alongside Jack, “we are out here to fish salmon, not to shoot seals.”
“I’ve got some fucking crew,” said Daley, the skipper. “By Jesus, have I got a crew.” He replaced the rifle. “Bastards,” he said. He drove forward at top revs. “Cunts.” He flew along the swirling sheets in a fury. “Fishermen, my arse!” he shouted, and turned in an arc by the buoy and cut the engine. They drifted there, as Hugh turned herrings on a pan, buttered bread and watched the pork chops swimming to and fro in a hot froth of cooking oil. At the wheel skipper Daley stood with his arms folded looking scornfully towards America.
It took over a fortnight before Jack could settle down on board. His hands had softened, the net bit into his palms and his dreams were not dreams at all. His sleep was not sleep. It was one long hallucinogenic recall of an undefinable city, where people harangued and jibed and whinged. Gurning. Then followed lowered voices you might hear from a house in mourning. A house of leaded lights and stained glass perched on the edge of reality, on a street somewhere beyond consciousness.
As he lay on his bunk waiting for sleep, a black-and-white roll call of images would light up on some psychic screen in his mind. Always at sea it began. Blame. Sorrow. Elation. Jack would remember her shoulder blades warm against him. The sweetness would be unbearable. Love smells. Woman smells. The small of her back. The two of them turning in their sleep so that they both faced the same way.
He’d open his eyes to discover he was in darkness at sea in a Force Seven. The sound of the engine was monstrous. Across from him Hugh and Thady were rocking to and fro in their bunks. The quiet Belfastman, Theo De Largey, was sleeping with his mouth open. With each lunge of the boat De Largey fought to keep the engine from intruding into his subconscious. “Daley,” he’d shout, “I’ll fucking swing for you.” Like Jack, he too was trying to enter a landscape that was tranquil. But it was impossible to get the sound of the engine out of your head.
“I had it nearly perfect,” De Largey would say.
“Where were you?”
“It’s private.” He turned to face inwards against the cabin wall. “Maybe I’ll tell you some day.”
“Yeah, sure.” They’d turn away from each other. And start counting down to the moment they could enter sleep again.
Jack would count the revolutions of the engine and seek to enter his dreamworld through a small comfortable gap in the noise. The gap would appear as the trawler perched on one long roll. It felt like they might stay up there for ever. And just as he’d be pouring his consciousness through the break, a new run of thunderous waves would shoot the engine up into a perilous whine. Seven waves later the gap would appear again. As he’d make for it, he’d resurrect Catherine. Then just as he’d reach her the Atlantic would strike the bow, sending the waters flooding into his consciousness. The lurch would send him sliding. He’d hold on to the last image of Catherine in his head while the boat shuddered, and fell down a series of rocky steps.
Somewhere on the descent he’d always lose her. The sense of loss would be painful and bewildering. Then, reaching again a few seconds of promised calm, he’d arrive at a new warm perspective from which to view her. The oily sleeping bag, the coarse wool of the jumper that did as a pillow, became light as air. The floor of the bunk, which was only a few inches away from his face, became a distant ceiling. All receded. He braced his foot against the wall. Her white shoulder would swim into view. Her scandalous shins. His consciousness idled.
“Jesus!” shouted De Largey as the lurch came again. “That fucker Daley.”
28
Searching for Jack in Yeats’ County
Catherine moved into a spare room over the Arts Centre. The attic roof sloped over the single bed. At night she was the only human being in the building, and sometimes it scared her, being there alone. She’d hear sounds from the kitchen in the basement. A lamp creaking in the theatre. Footsteps on the stairs that came to a standstill on the landing. And she’d wonder about these faceless men, these violent creatures of her imagination, who were gathering outside her door.
She did stage management. She served behind the coffee bar. She cooked vegetarian meals. She closed the theatre at night, then sat with a bottle of wine reading Anaïs Nin. She read The Wide Sargasso Sea and exulted in the erotic details of female conspiracy.
Since he’d left, Catherine had been followed by terrifying memories of the risks they’d taken by living together.
Her dreams were mainland dreams. Dreams of drowning. While the roar of the engine at sea would produce in the fishermen dreams of rare silence as if their consciousness was struggling to rid itself of the mayhem of straining pistons, on land all of the noise from the sea seemed to travel directly into the sleeper’s inner ear. Catherine’s themes were desertion, betrayal and outrageous sexuality. All of the men she had ever known returned as lesser demons over whom she had complete control.
Wakening was always distressing. To find herself reaching out to Matti Bonner in a scandalous dream. To be tucked away in the spare room beneath the stars and then wake to hear the first of the trendy theatre workers arriving. And sometimes to wake, disorientated, on a settee in a girlfriend’s kitchen where a radio was still playing, a cat she didn’t know sitting disdainfully on a window ledge, another woman’s dress hanging on the back of the door. It seemed an act of treachery that all the things she had collected – her books, her records, her diaries – should end up being stored backstage in view of all the theatre crew.
Some nights she’d find items of her personal belongings used as stage props. Her books sat on a shelf in a one-act play by Seán O’Casey. A woman wore one of her scarves in The Factory Girls.
The status her feminist principles had once given her had begun to wear off. She could still draw cruelly on her politics to taunt those men she worked alongside in the theatre, or in the BBC where some afternoons she’d go to record short plays. She walked past rooms in Broadcasting House that contained news items that would never see the light of day. Her cynicism made her many enemies, but her politics kept vigil over her hurt.
“You’re using feminism,” said a drama producer there, “like those bastards use Royalism. In a few years you’ll be ashamed of all this.”
“I don’t have to answer that,” she said.
“As a matter of fact, you’re a Romantic.”
“It still,” she replied, “has a certain allure.” Then staring him down she said: “Why can’t you give me something to do that I can get my teeth into?”
He pressed the exit sign on his computer.
“See this?” he said, “This is what I do all day. I don’t read. I watch. I add up. I edit I work for the BBC. I drive home. When I wake up at night I look out the window to see if the car is still there. I see my neighbours stretched out on the ground looking under theirs. So I know immediately what they work at. My brother-in-law is pounding at the door. He’s a policeman. What’s he asking for? Drink. I go to sleep with him sitting downstairs watching videos. He’s drinking gin. His sister, my wife, is drinking gin beside him. They’re having a party. So you see, you’re not the only one. This is your problem, Catherine, and this is my problem. This is what I do. Exit. Enter. OK?”
“I understand,” said Catherine.
She walked down a corridor past a window that looked into the radio newsroom. Already the girl had her finger on the switch that a moment later would release a song by Michael Jackson when the last news item from the province had been read, the last denunciation of the latest outrage expressed. Drunk, a news editor passed by oblivious of her, his bow tie soaked in port and hanging askew. Ian Paisley sat in a room waiting to be interviewed on agriculture grants within the EEC. His briefcase, stuffed to overflowing with Euro-speak, sat on the lap of the young economics expert he employed. The accountant looked tiny beside the rangy Reverend. They sat there like two passengers in an aeroplane. Next to them was a room full of Catholic schoolchildren in gymslips and uniforms who suddenly rose to sing an extract from Annie Get Your Gun. Catherine, near to tears, stood outside listening.
A porter threw a nut in the air and caught it in his mouth.
He, too, began to sing along with the children.
She took a cup of coffee and stood outside the studio where they were about to record the play she was in. Gangsters and their molls walked up and down rehearsing Mafioso talk with Belfast accents. Others were using the idioms of early rock’n’roll. These were the fantastic metaphors the province’s playwrights were reduced to. And she was outraged to find how, in those private moments before she stepped into the studio, what came to her mind was not the poetry she read, nor the moment in a novel that had exhilarated her. Not even one of the lines that she’d soon record. Instead, what she remembered was a series of words that she first took to be some jingle from a book of children’s rhymes she’d read as a child. Then the phrase, with a Biblical ring, defined itself clearly – Seek refuge in the Lord and not in princes.
“Seek refuge in the Lord and not in princes,” she heard herself say.
She’d remember as she sat at the booking-office desk how Jack’s grey eyes would go a dangerous violet as he grew excited. She’d think of the dangerous violet in his eyes and look round haughtily in case anyone could detect the soft aura about her body.
Then would come a dark torment, a bitterness, over the waste of time. I’m glad he’s gone. There’s others, she’d think grimly. She’d look at the queue of Belfast young people in a line before her, chatting, as if they were in any city in the world, and she’d wonder, with malevolence, about their lives. What made them tick? She felt estranged from them, the arts lovers. She was growing away from herself and all the sad conspiracies of the beleaguered city. They said this happened. After a while in Belfast you grew tired. It happened. It was natural. All her fears were shed by the time she’d sit down to write to Jack. When the theatre door shut out the hostile night and the red exit lights glowed in the darkness of the theatre, she’d begin writing in her room above. And though with each letter she felt she was betraying herself, still the minute she started writing, all the arguments ceased. It was as if the act of writing itself negotiated a middle ground. All the ambiguities remained but had somehow softened. The writing down of certain words would strangely enough bring her across the void, as if they contained some power of healing. What she kept hidden, even from herself, poured out. She’d imagine him reading through what she had written. With words she began to seduce him, knowing that each word would travel back to its source in his head.
Of this she was certain. She had never any doubt that he would understand.
Her letters to him were extraordinary displays of trust and tenderness and enchantment. On the table in her small room at the top of the theatre, a bottle of wine opened, a record playing, and the company cat moving about her shins, she wrote effortlessly. She wrote of her day-to-day work, with marvellously destructive set pieces on the new plays that had come to town. On people who might get in her way. Her bitchiness would turn to quirky humour. She’d tell stories of her life. She would grow strident and acrimonious about the false world to which she was contributing. She’d blame him for deserting her. For leaving her stranded.
Then the words would grow laconic and lovely.
He’d stand reading her letter in a shelter off the pier at Killalla and feel blessed.
Catherine bought copies of theatre magazines and searched through them to find roles for women in plays in the Republic.
She applied to the Druid theatre in Galway. She had a copy of the Western People sent to her from Mayo, she had a copy of the Sligo Champio
n delivered, and in her room she would read through reports of law trials in Castlebar and Grange, sheep markets in Erris, visitations to Knock shrine, fair days in Belmullet, goat fairs in Foxford, and then lie down with a copy of a new script about life in Belfast, which she could not bring herself to read.
She’d wonder was it possible that she could live that sort of a life, out there on Mullet. She read of the neighbours arguing over land, sales in Penney’s, céilí music in Tubbercurry, prayers for the dead, set-dancing workshops; and she thought: where do I fit into all of this? It was not only that all this had happened a long time ago in another dimension, that it was rural and unsophisticated. Not even that it was Catholic, with pages of newspapers given over to novenas and mindless prayers.
It was foreign, and at peace.
That was what alienated her most of all. And yet she persevered. The replies came. The Druid theatre had no room in its permanent company. The Hawkswell had no company at all. RTE’s drama department was not taking on new actors. A number of replies came from various agencies. Then to her disbelief she was offered a part in an advertisement for lager. A note arrived asking her to attend a photo session. A few weeks later she found herself dressed as a cowgirl in a shack out in the Glens of Antrim. A pint of lager arrived on a tray held by a man on horseback. With the cheque for a thousand pounds she bought herself a dress, packed all she could carry into the Lada and left Belfast.
I thought I could never do this, she was saying to herself over and over, as she drove South. In Fermanagh she stopped off to see her mother.
“Stay here,” said Maisie, “and continue on tomorrow.”
“No,” said Catherine. “If I stop now I’ll never go on.”
As she crossed the border at Blacklion she felt like a deserter, as her father, years before her, must have felt. All that journey west to Belmullet she thought of Jonathan Adams making this same trip away from a reality that must have been tormenting him. She drove through the night without stopping, down small roads that were littered with the corpses of badgers and rabbits, and just after Bellacorrick, a young fox. She stopped the car, got out and lifted the warm body over a white hedge of late may. The body was still warm. Mist was rising.
