by Colum McCann
“The Queen herself,” said the young mother, clearly beaming, as if there might be multiple copies of the monarchy. Her tongue was loose with a little lager. She said with a sniff that President Obama was coming, too, in the exact same week. Strange collisions. It hardly mattered: all I had to do was sell my letter.
The ferry bumped up against the far shore. Gulls wheeled above us. I bid the family good day and shunted Georgie back into the car.
I skirted around the coast road. To hell with the cost of diesel. A large queue of cars gathered impatiently behind me. They overtook, flashing their headlights. One even stopped in the middle of the road, got out of his car, and said: “Fuck you, you stupid old cow,” and I thanked him for his remarkable eloquence. I inquired if he, too, was on his way to see the Queen. A footman’s humor. He didn’t laugh.
There was no avoiding the busy road. Large trucks bore up behind. I was going so fast that the steering wheel shook in my hands. A rigid pain in both my shoulders. I passed the border without even knowing it and when I stopped at the first petrol station I could find, I recalled that I needed to get euros. The clerk, a young Asian gentlemen, directed me towards the bank machine. A moment of freeze. What message would come up on the screen? How do you explain, at seventy-two years of age, such a stranded life?
The screen flickered an instant, but out came the small sheaf of money, the little rollers of joy.
I bought Georgie a celebratory sausage roll. I thought about splurging on a packet of cigarettes, a habit from the old days, but decided against it. We inched out onto the old road with a full tank of diesel.
I switched on the radio in the car. All the talk was of security and the Queen’s visit. They didn’t seem so worried about a bullet for Obama. Our complex histories. Inner colonialism indeed. I switched the station. The traffic deepened the farther south I got. It had already taken me four hours from Belfast, largely to do with Georgie’s bladder control. Every twenty miles or so I had to pull the car to the side in order to let her relieve herself. She wasn’t too fond of the journey and kept whimpering in the backseat until I finally allowed her to sit up front with her head out the passenger-side window.
It was early evening by the time I reached the outskirts of the city. I dawdled along, cursing myself for having booked a hotel in the city center. It would have been far easier to find a place on the outskirts. Dublin so much like anywhere else. Swerving flyovers. Shopping centers. Streets pepper-sprayed with For Sale signs. Closing Down. Liquidity Blowout. Empty glass towers. The repetitive strain of what we have all become. The vain show. The status hunger. I took advantage of the bus lanes and made my way along Gardiner Street. A Guard tried to flag me but I just kept going, waggling my northern license plate like a young girl parading herself along. I wanted to walk across the Beckett Bridge just for the sheer irony of it, No matter, try again, fail again, fail better, but got caught up in a vicious series of one-way junctions and traffic roadblocks for the state visits.
It was almost eight o’clock in the evening when I finally pulled up outside the Shelbourne, an expensive treat for myself. The valet, a vile little Spanish snob, looked at the car and then at me with more disdain than I can possibly describe, and then I was curtly told that there were no dogs allowed. Of course not. I had to admit to myself that I had known it all along. No point fooling any longer. Not much beyond a snob myself, of course. I feigned outrage and indignation, then promptly got snarled in the traffic again. The truth was I had hardly any money left at all, certainly not for the luxury of a hotel.
Georgie and I slept in the car park by the beach out at Sandymount. Four other vehicles alongside me. Homeless families, I presumed. There was the vacant thought of how ordinary my own problems were. The families were sandwiched tight in their cars. Blankets and hats pulled up around them. All their possessions piled high on the roof, strapped down with rope. They looked like figures from some of my mother’s earliest black-and-white photographs. We seem to have a touching conviction that these things will never happen in our own territory. As if nothing of the past can happen in the present. The Grapes of Wrath. One of the cars even had a bumper sticker: Celtic Tiger, My Arse. The Guards paid us a visit in the middle of the night, shone a torch in the window, but allowed us be. I pulled my coat high and huddled into the seat. A chill knifed through the gap in the door. I pulled Georgie into my lap to warm me, but she lost her bladder twice, poor thing.
In the morning the children from the neighboring car were staring in the window. To distract them while I changed, I asked them to take Georgie for a run along the strand. I slipped them a two-euro coin. Still, one of the little monsters said: “She smells.” Frankly, I didn’t know if she meant me or the dog. A surge of grief in my stomach. The children looked relieved to get away from me. I watched the imprint of their feet in the soft sand dissolve. An enormous stretch of gray towards the green of the headlands.
Later I walked with Georgie to Irishtown for breakfast and found a café where they allowed her to doze at my feet. I washed my coat out in the sink, dabbed my dress clean, stared at myself in the mirror. I combed my hair and put on a line of lipstick. Small matters, ancient pride.
The radio warned of more huge traffic jams. I left the car at the beach and took a taxi, which tried looping its way around towards the area of Smithfield. The driver was a local. “Keep the dog at your feet for fucksake,” he said. A roll of fat twisted at the back of his neck.
We hit more traffic and found ourselves snared. He cursed the Queen with remarkable dexterity. I had to get out and walk the last quarter mile. The driver asked for a tip. Throwaway, I thought, but before I could say anything he cursed and sped off.
Smithfield was a shabby little area of the city that didn’t fit my perception of what it might have been, but then again neither did David Manyaki who was waiting for me on the street corner.
I had expected an older man, formal, gray-haired, leather patches on the sleeves of his jacket. With silver spectacles and a gravelly manner. Perhaps he would wear one of those small African hats, I could not for the life of me remember the name of them, small and boxy and colorful. Or maybe he would look more like those tall Nigerian businessmen in their shiny blue suits and tight white shirts and baleful little bellies?
Manyaki was in his early thirties. An elegant jumble sale. He was wide of chest, muscled, with a slight touch of flab about him. His hair was in loose cornrows, but fell into short tubes that swung down to his jaw—I tried to remember the word for the style, but couldn’t, my mind wasn’t catching. He wore a rumpled sports jacket, but underneath it was a colorful dashiki, yellow with threaded silver. He shook my hand. I felt heavy and frumpy, but there was something about Manyaki that sprinkled a line of salt along my spine. He reached for Georgie and petted her. His accent was more deeply African than it had been on the phone, though there was a lilt of Oxford to it.
“Dreadlocks,” I said to him, rather ridiculously.
He laughed.
We entered a dank little café. The owners had set up a small television on the counter where they were watching the events of the day unfold: the Queen was on her way to the Garden of Remembrance. There were scattered protests in the streets. No riot guns, no rubber bullets, no CS gas. The TV commentators were interested in the notion that she had landed in a green dress. I have never been much for monarchy, and although I grew up nominally Protestant, an ancient part of me still aligned itself with Lily Duggan.
We ordered coffee. The television droned in the background.
When I showed Manyaki the letter, he held the plastic at the very edge and turned it around in his fingers. I explained to him that it was written on behalf of my great-grandmother who had worked as a young girl in the house on this very street, Brunswick, but he corrected me immediately and said that Douglass had stayed on Great Brunswick, which was now renamed Pearse Street.
“I was wondering why you wanted to meet here,” he said.
“This is not Great Brunswi
ck?”
“Afraid not.”
I felt a flood of embarrassment that he might know more about my own great-grandmother’s workplace than me, but he was the scholar after all. He, too, seemed chagrined that he had corrected me, and said there wasn’t really all that much known about the street, or the house, since it was long knocked down, though Richard Webb greatly interested him. He said we could try to walk down to Pearse Street, but the Queen’s visit had put a tourniquet on the city.
The letter was sealed in the archival sleeve. He wasn’t perturbed at the idea that he couldn’t open it. He said he had no real idea what had happened to Isabel Jennings, though she had quite possibly helped Frederick Douglass to buy his freedom through a woman in Newcastle, an Ellen Richardson, a Quaker long active in the cause.
—He went back to America unslaved.
Unslaved. It was a curious and lovely word, and I liked Manyaki all the more for it. There was no more Brown Street left in Cork either, he said. It had been knocked down, as far as he knew, in the 1960s, to make way for a supermarket. He wasn’t sure when the Jennings family had left, though he had an inkling that it might have been during the Famine. There was a good deal of guilt for anyone to carry, he said, English or Anglo. I told him that there had been an amethyst brooch that went down through the decades also, but it had long been lost somewhere in Canada—Toronto or perhaps St. John’s.
He lifted his glasses and squinted up at the television screen. A helicopter hovered. This remarkable peace that has held so long.
Manyaki held the letter at its edges and turned it over, back and forth, then brought it close to the light until I asked him not to expose it too much as the handwriting was delicate, even inside the plastic.
What I liked most about Manyaki is that he did not ask me to open the letter, nor to borrow it so his colleagues in university could bombard it with protons or neutrons or whatever else they might use to discern what lay inside. I think he understood that I wasn’t interested in getting to the endpoint, if there was any, and that the prospect of truth was not especially attractive: for such a young man, an academic, he was still curiously interested in the elusive.
There was a collector in Chicago, he said, who had paid thousands for Douglass memorabilia. The collector had already bought a Bible that had belonged to Douglass, and had made an outrageous bid on a pair of barbells that ended up, instead, in a Washington, D.C., museum.
Manyaki ran a finger along his temple: “Any clue what the letter says?”
“I think it’s just a thank-you note.…”
“Oh.”
“As far as I know.”
“Well, that’s our secret then.”
“Nobody’s ever opened it. Jack Craddogh calls it a conceit.”
“He would,” said Manyaki, and I liked him all the more for his remarkable candor. He seemed to drift away for a moment, stirring sugar into his coffee. “My father used to write me letters on that thin airmail paper, the crinkly stuff.” He said nothing more, but pried open the top of the plastic and inhaled the smell and then looked up sheepishly at me. What distances had he come? What stories did he himself carry?
Manyaki took out his phone and began snapping pictures of the letter. He was careful with it but there were a couple of tiny little flakes that had separated from the plastic: no more than bits of dust really. The natural entropy of things. I said something inane about us all falling apart in various ways, and he shut the plastic but a tiny pinhead of the paper had fallen on the table.
“You really think you can get a price for it?” I asked.
“How much do you need?”
I half-laughed. He did, too, but gently.
He held his head at a slight angle, like a man whose face has just been touched by someone he did not yet really know. Why had the letter been kept in the first place? The things we put away most carefully in a drawer might very well be the things we will never, again, find. He reached across as if to touch the back of my hand but drew back and picked up his coffee mug instead.
“I can check it out,” he said, pushing back the archival sleeve across the table. “I’ll email these photos later on today.”
The crumbs from the envelope still lay on the table. He glanced down at them. I’m sure he did it without thinking, but Manyaki absently licked the top of his finger and pressed it down upon one. He was looking beyond my shoulder. A tiny piece of paper. The size of a needlehead. He looked at it a long time, but was clearly off somewhere else in a reverie. He dabbed the crumb onto his tongue, held it there a moment, then swallowed.
When he realized what he had done, he stammered an apology but I said it was all right, it would have been swept away with the dishes and teacups anyway.
I DROVE OUT from Sandymount to Manyaki’s house later that night. He lived farther along the coast in Dún Laoghaire. Georgie had taken ill in the car. She was not able to move her hindquarters, and had lost control of her bowels. I tried to carry her. The sheer weight. I staggered up the steps and rang the doorbell.
His wife was a pale Irish beauty with a sophisticated accent. “Aoibheann,” she said. She took Georgie from my arms immediately and backed into the shadows.
It was a beautiful house with all manner of artwork, small sculptures on white pedestals, a line of abstracts, and what looked to me like a Sean Scully painting along the staircase.
She hurried me into the kitchen where Manyaki was sitting at an islanded countertop. Two young boys beside him, in football pajamas, doing their homework. Their sons. A perfect blend. They would have been called mulatto once.
“Hannah,” he said. “I thought you were going back up north.”
“Georgie’s sick.”
“Do you need a veterinarian?” said Aoibheann.
Manyaki spread out a sheet of newspaper near the rear kitchen door, put Georgie down upon it, searched on his mobile phone. It took several calls, but he found one in nearby Dalkey on house-call duty. On the phone his accent was more Oxford than African now, his words more clipped and angular. I wondered what sort of upbringing he’d had, his father a civil servant perhaps, his mother a teacher. Or maybe a small dusty suburb of Mombasa. Swimming pools. Cool white linen. Or a small balcony overlooking a hot street. An imam calling everyone out to prayer. The ample sleeves of his father’s robes. The arrests, the tortures, the disappearances. Or perhaps he had grown up wealthy, a housetop on a hill, the radio tuned to BBC, a youth in the swimming pools of Nairobi. A university education, a squalid flat in London maybe? How had he ended up here, at the edge of the Irish Sea? What was it that brought us such distances, rowing upwards into the past?
He snapped the phone shut and went back to working with his children on their homework. I felt rather foolish standing there alone—he had forgotten me for a moment. I was grateful that his wife took me by the elbow, sat me down at the granite island, and poured a glass of cranberry juice for me.
The kitchen didn’t aspire to a magazine page but it could have—fine cabinetry, elaborate knives in butcher-block holders, a brand-new stove made to appear ancient, a red espresso machine, a small remote-control TV that actually appeared from a panel in the fridge. Aoibheann fussed over me—“Sit down, sit down,” she said—but then had the grace to allow me to cut some shallots and slice potatoes for gratin. She somehow managed to refill the glass of cranberry without my noticing. The news flickered on the fridge: the Queen with the Irish president, another bank collapse, a bus crash.
The doorbell finally rang. The veterinarian was a young woman who already seemed tired of all the dramas she faced. She clicked open a small black leather case and leaned over Georgie.
“Calm down,” she said to me without even looking me in the eye.
She examined Georgie carefully, caressed her belly, examined her legs, looked at a stool sample, shone a light at her teeth and throat, and told me the dog was old. As if that were a revelation. I was quite sure she was going to tell me that she would have to put Georgie down, but she sai
d that the dog was simply exhausted and a little malnourished, possibly had an intestinal infection, that she could do with a round of antibiotics just in case. There was an element of tut-tut in her manner. Malnourished. I felt myself cringe. She scribbled out a prescription and waved it in the air with a bill. Eighty euros.
I fumbled in my purse but Aoibheann just shook her head, opened her handbag, took out her wallet.
“You’ll stay the night with us,” she said, glancing across at Manyaki.
NOTHING EVER FINISHES. Aoibheann came from a wealthy Irish family, the Quinlans, who had made quite a fortune over the years in food processing and banking. Her father, Michael Quinlan, was a regular on the pages of Irish business magazines. Father and daughter were largely estranged it seems, possibly due to the marriage with Manyaki.
She and Manyaki had been married in London in a civil ceremony and some element of mystery shrouded their past, perhaps a child or an immigration scandal, it was unclear to me, though it hardly mattered; they were a good couple, and whatever went on with her father seemed to have bridged them rather than torn them asunder. They moved generously around each other, nothing false or cloying. Their children were loud and obnoxious at the dinner table in the manner of children everywhere. Oisin and Conor. Five and seven years old, as dark as they were light.
Aoibheann ran a bath for me in the claw-footed tub. I put my face under the water. She had left some bath-oil beads in a small jar with a ribbon. I reached for it but the whole jar tumbled. One dissolved in my hand. From a distance I could hear the ship horns, boats moving through Dún Laoghaire. Everyone rushing to get somewhere. The desire for elsewhere. The same port that Frederick Douglass came through all those years ago. The water lapping around me. Traveling the widening splash. Tomas. They shot him for a bird gun. George Mitchell’s peace. The Queen had bowed her head at the Garden of Remembrance.
