TransAtlantic: A Novel

by Colum McCann

  I PULLED ON my wetsuit and went out the back door into the dark. The water came right up to the lawn. The low stone wall was green with slime. I zipped the wetboots tight and went down the slipway, waded in the high tide. Georgie barked on the shore and by the time I turned around she was already in the water. A reluctant swimmer, our Georgie, so it was all the more endearing that she paddled out, her brown eyes shining and just a little panicked. I must have looked quite a sight to her: the tight wetsuit, only the chub of my face visible along with a few gray hairs escaping from the side of the hood. I eased in. The small shock of cold, and then the lockdown of warmth.

  To allay Georgie’s fears I stayed close to shore, floating on my back, looking up at the stars making their claw marks. As a boy Tomas loved the notion that the light hitting our eyes might be coming from a star that had already disappeared. For a period he studied the sky and all its complex configurations. He heard the Alcock and Brown story from his grandmother, and wanted to know what Brown might have known way back then to navigate the Atlantic. Flying on instinct and beauty and fear. It amazed him that Brown had flown without a gyroscope. Tomas took his boat out on the lough and charted the stars on graph paper. He brought a sextant with him, binoculars, a spirit level, an infrared flashlight. The occasional patrols on the lough shone their lights at him: the Coast Guard were well versed in our family’s habits, but the military units were miserable. Searchlights on their boats, they pulled up quick and sudden. Loud hailers. Parachute flares. He was petulant with them and gave them lip, until they figured out he was harmless enough, just a boy with an odd yearning, though once they tipped his boat over, and all his careful charts were ruined. In later years, in university dorms, he darkened his windows, painted the walls black, cut luminous stickers out to place on the ceiling, navigated from there. A solitary life.

  After he was taken from us—it is still so hard to say murder—I found myself obsessing about whether or not Tomas had ever kissed a girl, until I met one he had apparently gone out with for a while, a vulgar little hussy who worked in an insurance office on the Ormeau Road. She cured my illusions of another life for him.

  There are times when the past acquires a particular resonance and we grow sensitive to the noises normally beyond the range of hearing. Our Tomas was very much nourished by the tangled skein of connections. He sat with his grandmother in our house on the Malone Road and listened to her stories, and wanted at one stage to create a mathematical model of where he came from: Newfoundland, Holland, Norway, Belfast, London, St. Louis, Dublin. A zigzag line all the way back to Lily Duggan. I asked him what the diagram might look like and he thought about it for a moment and said that it could be something akin to a nest in a tree as seen against a background of high-speed cinematography. I had little idea what he meant at the time, though it strikes me now as intricately beautiful, the twigs taken from everywhere, bits and pieces, leaves and branches, crossing and crisscrossing, years of time lapse, Catholic, British, Protestant, Irish, atheist, American, Quaker, all the time the clouds dispersing in the shaped-out sky behind him.

  Lord above, I miss my boy. Even more so as the years go by. At my most morose, I have to acknowledge that quite possibly the reason I put pen to paper is precisely because I have nobody left to whom I can tell the story. After Tomas died, Lawrence walked his tweeds towards another farm in Fermanagh, left the cottage to me. He left the guilt in the lough, said I would find my own way out, somehow. The truth of the matter is that the light at the end of the tunnel generally belongs to the pharmaceutical companies. There wasn’t much hope I could take, even in memory. Two generations of mothers were still alive when Tomas was taken from us. He was happiest of all with his grandmother. Nana, he called her. They sometimes sat on deckchairs on the edge of the lough. She used to say that she was younger than him, and perhaps in some ways she was. It sounds corny when I strike the nib of the pen against the page, but there are times I think the pendulum has reached the top of its arc.

  I SWAM FOR the best part of an hour until every small part of me hurt with cold, then I waddled up the garden with Georgie in tow. I changed into every cardigan I have ever owned and walked, still shivering, to the kitchen. Georgie was shoved up tight against the Aga stove and I joined her, then made a feed of sausages and eggs and beans. She curled up at my feet while I sat at the table, and wiped my feet on moonlight on the floor.

  TO GET MY senses back after a night of tossing and turning, I walked Georgie around the island in the cold snap of dawn. Or rather she walked me. My curlew was calling from the eastern pladdies. I was glad to hear her after so long. I used to think that her call was forlorn, but her return makes her so much more than a sound.

  Georgie ambled alongside me among the tangle of old ropes and smashed oars and broken orange buoys washed in on the edge of the shore. The tide was returning and I cut up towards the mudflats, pulled myself along by holding on to the long reeds, unsettled a smoky muck from the bottom of the water. I sat still for several minutes, the better to absorb the landscape, or rather be absorbed by it.

  When I crested the curve in the road my phone beeped. Somehow the bank had gotten a hold of the number of my BlackBerry. There were two new messages waiting. Very polite. The suitors to my genteel poverty. The little red light pulsed in my pocket. I erased them without even listening.

  I turned the corner and looked at the cottage, low against the lough. It struck me there and then that if I didn’t do something quickly, I would not be able to do anything at all.

  THE LAND ROVER started first time, ancient horse. Georgie climbed in the backseat, her muzzle to the glass. She needed a bath. I cracked the window. The clutch was tight and it took me a while, out the driveway, along past the pladdies, beyond the ruins, the four miles up to the village.

  A handsome young man filled her with diesel and then returned my credit card with a slightly embarrassed shrug. He checked the tires and put in a liter of oil, put his finger to the front of a backwards baseball hat.

  “No charge, Mrs. Carson,” he said. “That’s on us.”

  He stuffed a rag into the pocket of his overalls, turned away. I called him back, closed his fingers around a single pound coin, and he blushed.

  “Mind the road now.”

  I pulled out in the light drizzle, my eyes hazy with gratitude.

  Cars with their lights on in the middle of the morning blazed up behind me. I waved politely for them to go around me, then adjusted to a victory sign as more and more of them passed. Some of them even had the good humor to laugh. It took almost twenty minutes for me to get onto the main road, only narrowly avoiding a crash, which would have solved all my problems neatly.

  I had to chuckle on the stretch near Comber when even a slow boat on a trailer passed me, the driver flashing her hazards.

  The traffic in Bangor was backed up along the street. The town was bustling. Cars, lorries, delivery vans, bicycles. I hemmed the Land Rover into an illegal spot that demanded I should use a disabled sticker. The one I used for ferrying my mother back and forth was five years out of date, but I placed it up on the dashboard anyway.

  I sat on the back bumper and changed from my Wellingtons into a good pair of shoes. I felt rather crusty in my old green hunting jacket, so I took it off and turned it inside out, draped it over my arm. I wore a cardigan and an old blue dress Lawrence had bought for me decades ago: the back of the dress had been let out several times so that it was a patchwork, but from the front it looked just fine, especially with the cardigan draped over it. I walked Georgie down High Street, her hair wild and unbrushed.

  The doors of the bank were equipped with a series of confounding alarms. I was as touchy as a triggered trap. When I finally got inside they told me that I had to leave Georgie outside, that dogs were not allowed. I told the poor young clerk that I was not only deaf, but blind, too, and that Georgie was the only one around who had a Ph.D. in civil engineering, hence the only way I could pass their ridiculous Alcatraz.

 
; “I’ll see what I can do, Mrs. Carson.”

  I could see them conferring in the corner. Their little bespectacled cabal. They bobbed back and forth, little Halloween apples. The manager himself crossed in the glass behind and looked out at me, rather worried. I gave him an enormous wave. He surprised me by reciprocating, and I thought to myself that perhaps we could have a decent battle, he and I, but then I realized that there was nothing safe about a game of brinksmanship when, quite literally, my heritage was at stake.

  I was made to wait forty-five minutes. Waves of claustrophobia came at me. The unhealthy illusion that I could deal with them was coupled with a dread that they would somehow lead me away in handcuffs. Georgie’s bladder was up to its usual tricks and she let loose a stream over by the fake flowerpots. I was adolescently proud of her and fed her a handful of treats. She lay down and nuzzled against my feet. The afternoon light was fading outside. I watched the to-and-fro of the customers. My mother would never have stood for it. She would have been acutely offended, simply to be called into the bank, let alone to have them question her accounts and threaten her home. She had so loved rebuilding the cottage over the years: new windows, insulation, the sunroom. Even in her last years, pushing herself around in a wheelchair, she still obsessively wanted to make sure the walls were washed, the door handles oiled, the frames waterproofed.

  Simon Leogue finally slid across the floor towards me. A gray suit. Sandy haired. Sharp-faced. Thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old, it’s increasingly difficult for me to tell anyone’s age. He glanced down at where Georgie was lying and said that he’d be happy for one of his employees to take the dog outside for what he called a wee stroll. I told him the dog was quite all right, thank you very much, and was tempted to berate his attempt at a northern accent but decided against it.

  “Would you like to come to the back office, Mrs. Carson?”

  “I’d rather conduct my business here, thank you. I have nothing to be ashamed of. You can call me Hannah. I’m not a tombstone.”

  “Of course not,” he said.

  He had quick eyes. He flicked a look at Georgie. Undid an elastic strap from around a folder. His fingernails were not well groomed. There were red welts at the quick of his thumbs. But his hands disappeared when he went into the rather obvious annihilation of my finances. My mortgage. My overdraft. A spear is a spear—it can be thrown from a distance or slid in slowly, perfectly placed between the ribs. He did both at once, remarkably well. I almost liked him for his cool and aplomb. He said he might have to freeze the overdraft until I sold the house. Otherwise it would be foreclosed. He remained even-keeled, artfully uninformative, said there were a number of wonderful small apartments for rent around town, or even out by the sea once my finances were properly in order. “It’s a lough, not the sea,” I said, but he shrugged as if there would never be a difference. He didn’t mention assisted living or a nursing home, which really would have sent me off the cliff. I said something ridiculous about Mayakovsky and the amortization of the soul, but even I knew it was hopeless. I had to admire the skill and unfailing politeness with which I had been very quickly outmaneuvered. He sat there, a young hound pleased with himself, and I felt denser than usual. The ancient iconography of the Irish imagination: eviction.

  I said I would like to take the figures away with me and have my accountant study them properly.

  He sighed heavily and slid his business card towards me. “Accountant?” He said he would give me as much time as he could, but quite frankly there wasn’t much left. “My home number is on here if it’s of any help.”

  I was too self-sunken to respond. Strangely, there was a shine of grief in his eye. He blinked and looked away from me. I was terrified for a moment that he might be upset on my behalf.

  “You should wash your hands better, Simon,” I said.

  Georgie dwelled a little long on the floor and I yanked the leash hard, a savage thing to do, but my fury was welling towards tears, and I was not going to let it happen inside the bank.

  Outside, the Bangor light stung my eyes. A surge of self-pity lodged at my breastbone. A farm tractor, of all things, trundled down Queens Parade. They are hardly seen anymore these days, but this one had a young boy at the helm, a collie dog at his heels near the gear stick. He actually smiled back and raised a forefinger from the steering wheel when I nodded. Tomas was never the sort of boy who was cut out for work on the farm. He avoided it at all costs. Preferred the boat. Why Tomas took the shotgun out with him that morning, I have no idea. He wasn’t even fond of bird hunting; it was simply the done thing, the stuff of his stepfather. In his early teens he never hunted at all. He preferred binoculars. Drifting out on the water. It all came down to vectors and angles. He wondered if there was a way to chart the natural world. There was a laze to him, our Tomas, he was never going to be one who lit up the world, but he was more than enough for me. The stolen gun never resurfaced. Who knows what history it served, or whether it was just thrown away and buried down in the bog to join the ancient elk, the bones, the butter?

  I watched the tractor go, then straightened out soon enough with a quick slap of reality. The Land Rover was at the far end of the street, clamped. A pretty yellow boot. I wasn’t even about to argue with the parking attendants. They stood, surly and malevolent, at the far end of the street. I went straight back across to the bank and got the cash from the machine in the wall before Simon could freeze the overdraft.

  I begged them to let me go for free, but the parking attendants exercised their abundant ability to shrug. I paid the fine, but it still took them an age to remove the boot.

  Georgie was sleeping in the backseat by the time I pulled down the laneway. I went digging in the garden out back to burn off the anger, or the fear, of the day. I turned a few sods in the old tomato patch. A drizzle fell across the sky, orange in the ambient light from Bangor. One never thinks the stars will disappear. Our failed attempts at navigation. I kicked the mud off my boots and went inside. How many times do we end up scraping the muck from the mirror? There was a gallery of rogues in the passageway near the pantry where I dropped the shovel. The everyday suspects. My mother in her tennis dress, a full-bodied red wine. My father in his RAF uniform. My grandfather at the gates of a linen factory. My American grandmother on the deck of a transatlantic liner. My Tomas holding up six mackerel on a single string. Jon Kilroyan, the farmhand, outside the fisherman’s cottage. My husband in tweeds and knee-high wading boots. Neighbors and old friends from the Women’s Coalition. A photo of me out fox hunting when I was very young, a beagle trotting behind me, my whole life so apparently prearranged, the privilege aligned along my spine.

  TWO DAYS OF storms. Georgie and I stayed indoors. The weather hacked across the lough. The sky was dark. Branches fell from the trees. Rain fell relentlessly. I got lost in its antiphonies.

  On the third day, I left. The letter sat in the passenger seat beside me, sleeved in its archival plastic. Hardly the best way to keep it, I suppose, but short of a humidified bank vault, it would have to do.

  The road to Belfast thickened with traffic. Cars behind me flashed their headlights and beeped loudly as they passed. I practiced my victory sign again, though it seems that the middle finger is the salute of choice these days. The cars beeped and swerved. I was glad to crawl along.

  Roundabouts have always confounded me. Just beyond Comber I somehow discovered myself on the road to Stormont, where my mother and I spent a good deal of time over a decade ago. She cried on Good Friday when the peace agreement was signed. Great fits of happy tears. She slid, like a seal, out of any old sadness she carried. There were still four more months left in her. She wanted to hold out for the full century, but told me shortly before she died that enough was enough. Why does death so catch us by surprise? When Tomas was taken away from her, she said it was as if a hole had been punched through her chest to wring out her ancient heart. Now she was graced by the idea of what she called George Mitchell’s peace. She had a fondness
too for John Hume, his head of wavy hair. Good men, she said. They had the courage to remain volleying at the net. One of her happiest moments was meeting Mitchell at the tennis club. His gray hair. His tracksuit top. The unfailing politeness of the man. The slight touch of an inner rogue to him. He stood with the racquet behind his back. He bowed to her as she spoke. The wheels turning in his mind, she knew. She told him he needed to work on his backhand.

  For her, Mitchell’s peace laid Tomas to rest. She went in her sleep. She was cremated and we billowed her out over the western sea. Her whole life defined by water, Newfoundland and beyond. There are times I imagine that she rode in that Vickers Vimy herself, willed it across the ocean. She so loved the story of Alcock and Brown, and often took out the photographs, showed them to us, went over them in intimate detail. So much of it was where her own life began.

  My own felt as if it were taking the swinging pendulum down. It was three or four years since I had been in Belfast. Our dreary, shapeless, soot-sullied town. Murals, alleyways, black taxis, high yellow cranes. It has always been so aggressively gloomy. But the university area surprised me—it was brighter, greener, full of spark. I parked and walked a distracted Georgie along, pulling hard at her leash. What marvelous names the city has, perhaps to carry away our grief. Holyland. Cairo Street. Damascus. Jerusalem. Palestine.