‘God bless the work.’
‘And you, too, Missus, when you’re at it.’
At the harbour they were scraping and tarring the boats. A man was lovingly measuring a square of calico over weakened timbers before covering it with a boiling mixture of tar and pitch from a tin jug. She loved the smell of the boiling tar in the sea air. There was a crazy doctor by the name of Doorley she remembered from her childhood who believed in the healing properties of tar, and each summer he tarred his ten children from head to toe. All of them were disturbed in later life. One became a beggar on the roads. Two committed suicide. Though her father, who was also a medical doctor, and others complained about his behaviour, nobody was able or willing to bring it to a stop. Everybody was too afraid. Authority could not be questioned then, especially when vested in a priest or doctor. How rapidly all that had changed. Sometimes she could hardly believe it had all taken place in the brief space of a lifetime.
As soon as the weather turned, the man with binoculars discarded his green oilskins for a thick jersey of unwashed grey wool with a worn black suit and a cloth cap. One day she stopped to talk to him, and the stop became almost mandatory. He had worked all his life in England, near Didcot, on buildings and line maintenance. Tommy McHugh was his name. He had five children, all grown. When they were growing up he saw them at Christmas and a few weeks each summer. During the war he didn’t see his family for four years. A child conceived during one visit was three years old when he next returned. Dog-tired after the boat and train journey, he woke in the morning to see a small boy standing at the foot of the bed, saying to all who’d listen, ‘That’s my Daddy!’ His wife and he had never lived together until he returned for good. She thought it must have been hard for them to come together after such absences, but she noticed he never talked about his wife unless she reflected a part of his own life.
‘Is it the colours you watch or the sea birds or just the ocean itself?’
‘I’d not be stupid enough to be watching anything like that,’ he replied slowly, a sly smile in his eyes. He looked at her with approval, as if she had laid a clever trap and he had danced clear. ‘I’d have no taste for watching anything like that. I’d be watching those sheep over there.’ He gestured towards the Head and handed her the binoculars. What were white specks beforehand grew into clear shapes.
‘Sheep are very stupid animals,’ he confided. ‘Hardly a week goes by but one of them doesn’t fall off.’
‘What do you do then?’
‘Sometimes you can get them back on their feet. More times they’re finished.’
‘Are you not too far off here?’
‘You can see better from here than on the Head, and it’s a cruel climb. The trouble is that it’s a very tasty bit of land.’
From that day on he always handed her the binoculars to look at the sheep. Over and over he told her about his hard life in England, the monies he sent home out of every pay-packet, how difficult it was to pass the time after work, but fortunately there was everlasting overtime.
One day he had with him a beautiful black-and-white collie pup on a long line of binder twine, timid and anxious to please, its coat woolly still, and before long she found herself looking forward to seeing it each day. At first, the man was enamoured: he was going to train it into the best working dog on the island. But during the weeks that followed, as the pup grew into a young, eager dog, and the training proceeded, complaints replaced the early in-loveness and praise. Sometimes the collie was ‘as stupid as the sheep’ he rushed and scattered. She observed how self-absorbed the man was, how impatient. Increasingly, she disliked that the young dog was in his control. She found herself wondering what his wife was like and how had she coped with his return? Thinking of the man and his life, and the dog and sheep, without warning, a buried memory of her father scattered the day. It was summer. She was home from college. Her father was late returning from a round of sick calls. Lunch was already on the table, and she was standing with her mother in the open bay window, when her father’s car came up the laurelled avenue and turned on the big square of gravel. Instead of coming straight into the house, he went around the car and took a whole side of lamb from the boot, placing a towel on his shoulder to carry it proudly in. The lamb was probably some payment in kind.
She saw no significance in the memory other than it had displaced this actual day of her life and the disturbance her observations of Tommy McHugh had caused. Her life with her father and mother had passed. Her life with her husband had now passed. Was her whole life, then, all nothing? Was it just what happened and the memory of those happenings, like the old classmate she had once chanced upon in the ship’s restaurant during a Holyhead–Dublin crossing? The classmate had grown old, was only dimly recognizable, as she herself had grown old, having to be asked, if, indeed, she was the girl at Earlsfort Terrace who played hockey and married one of the medical students. The memory of her father, though, had not grown old, had come to her out of all those dead years with more freshness and vividness than the actual sea thistle and heather between the rocks at her feet high above the pounding ocean. It could not all be nothing. ‘A mind lively and at ease with itself is content to look at nothing,’ she recalled a favourite passage from Jane Austen, ‘and that nothing will always answer back;’ and suddenly the recollection itself gave heart and belief to her walk. That was what always answered back, all that we had loved, all that we had cared for. Love is never tired or dispirited. Love is ever watchful and lively and at ease.
The black cat was waiting for her return to the cottage. She lifted her on to her shoulder and carried her into the house just as her husband used to do on his return from work. The cat, at least, seemed to have taken on a new lease of life since the move to Achill. She had started to hunt again and had brought mice and small birds, even a frog, into the bedroom through the partially open window as she had done in Castlebar when she was young. Other times she sat out on dry stones in the middle of the stream, gazing down studiously at the small trout streaking about or lying still in the pools. Mrs Waldron didn’t like the offerings of the mice or small birds in the bedroom. She hadn’t liked it in Castlebar, but her husband had said, ‘What harm is it anyhow? It’s her nature,’ and as he had sanctioned it, she did not want to be the one to end it now. After meticulous crunching of small bones, she heard a vigorous licking, then loud purring as the cat curled into the eiderdown, declaring to all her own approval of the good, providing cat she knew herself to be.
In the evenings Mrs Waldron prepared dinner for herself and Eileen. Mostly they talked of Eileen’s day, of practical things that concerned the house and gardens in Castlebar and of Michael Flynn. They never talked other than glancingly of the dead man, and when they did the conversation was quick to move.
Hotels and restaurants on the island began to reopen for Easter, and the Waldrons returned to Castlebar for two weeks of the holiday. Nearly all the family came back over Easter, but for no more than a day or two, and all of them arrived and left separately. After they left, Mrs Waldron was more eager than ever to get back to Achill. For the time being. Eileen still didn’t mind the hour-long drive on and off the island. ‘It fills a space where loss can’t get in.’
The summer was unusual, dry and hot, with hardly any of the usual soft rain. The island became crowded. Motor bikes roared past. People carrying blaring transistors walked or cycled by the cottage. Wild music came through open windows of passing cars and into fields sloping down to the harbour where whole families were saving hay. There was much broken glass along the roads. Eileen had taken holidays and gone to France for two weeks. Then her sister and brother and their families came to the house in Castlebar, and there was much to-ing and fro-ing between the house and the island, so much so that Mrs Waldron was seldom alone. She was fond of all of them and glad to have them, but glad too to have two whole days to herself before Eileen came back.
The morning Eileen was due she felt too excited to concentrate on anythi
ng, and after feeding the black cat she cleaned the entire cottage. Then she went to buy some staples that were running low. Close to the shops she came on a van selling fresh fish and bought a sea trout for dinner. She thought it a lucky or happy omen for Eileen’s return: though this place was surrounded by the ocean, it was difficult to obtain fresh fish. With all the preparations for the homecoming, she was later than usual setting out on her walk. Tommy McHugh kept her talking for a long time, and he was full of complaint about the young collie who cowered now more than ever when approached. This changed her mood so much that she took a different route back to the cottage to avoid them. There was a lack of feeling, of sensitivity, in the man that disturbed her, and she was beginning to regret ever having come to know him.
While Mrs Waldron was talking to Tommy McHugh, Murphy and Heslin came up the road to the cottage. They wore jeans and sneakers, and because of the heat they had taken off their shirts and knotted the sleeves around their throats so that the light cotton floated out behind them in the ocean breeze, leaving their torsos bare. Murphy carried a loud-playing transistor. Heslin had a large, canvas bag slung from his shoulder in which there was a pair of collapsible stools, swimming-trunks, three six-packs of lager and a deck of cards. They were both in their twenties, sold encyclopaedias for a living and had come to the island because they’d heard it attracted working-class girls from Scotland and Northern Ireland who were reputedly free with their favours. Heslin was the better-looking and more forceful of the two and was admired by Murphy. Three nights they had been on the island, and so far had had no luck with girls, even though they drank each night into the hopeful hours in several bars and discos. They never rose before midday.
The black cat was waiting between the gate and escallonias for Mrs Waldron, and when Murphy and Heslin paused she went towards them and rubbed her fur against the bars of the gate. As she had known nothing but kindness, she did not flee when Heslin stooped to lift her into the crook of his arm. She continued to purr as she was carried the first few yards from the house, but when she tried to get away he held her tight. Once she began to claw and cry he took her in his strong hands and thrust her into the canvas bag. The cat alternately tore and struggled, or cried plaintively, but every ploy she tried was ineffective.
They passed Gielty’s Bar and the whitewashed cottage where Tommy McHugh lived with his wife beside another small stream at its entrance.
‘You wouldn’t be interested in a pint before heading for the bay?’ Murphy suggested as they passed the bar.
‘Not with the bloody cat.’
‘What’ll you do with it?’
‘I’m not sure. We’ll see.’
Cars passed them as they began to climb the Head. A gang of bikers roared past aggressively in red helmets and black leather, a blue insignia painted on the back of the jackets. Below them a solitary old woman was threading her way back through the sheep and rabbit paths. They kept their heads low as they climbed, but as soon as they reached the summit they could see the bright strand in the two arms of the bay, the high, dark cliffs rising on the far side. There were no boats on the ocean. They descended quickly, the cat crying and struggling in the bag. An ugly, flat-roofed concrete hut or storeroom stood on the road above the bay. The bikers had turned around, revving the engines before roaring back. There were a few cars parked in a lay-by past the concrete hut. A couple of families were picnicking on the rocks between the cars and the strand. The sand was as white and unspoiled as it had looked from the summit and was completely empty. The tide was about to turn, and they walked far out to the water’s edge, a white froth marking the tideline, a gentle, dirty backwash of water and sand curling back underneath the froth. A single man followed them out and searched along the froth until he found a green plastic oil can which marked a set line. He then began to lift the hooks, freshly baiting each one with sand eels taken from a red plastic bucket. His catch was small, three little plaice, a dogfish, the white head of a sea trout. Before removing the head and rebaiting the hook, he paused in obvious disappointment: by the size of the head the trout must have been two or three pounds, a prize catch but for the seals. Murphy and Heslin were afraid he’d be attracted by the cries from the canvas bag, but he didn’t appear to notice. Throwing a metal weight on the end of the line far out into the tide when he finished, he disappeared up the strand with his bucket and the few fish he’d caught.
As he disappeared, Heslin handed the canvas bag to Murphy. He took a ball of fishing-line from his jeans, made a running noose on the end of it and cut off five or six feet with a penknife. Then he found a long, flat piece of rock and knotted the cut end of the line round its centre. Gingerly he inserted his arm into the bag Murphy still held. The cat cried, then went still, and he searched about until he could grip the fur on the back of the neck. Quickly he slipped the noose over her head before she could claw herself free. The cat shot away but was held by the line and rock. More strain and she would strangle herself. She tried to claw the noose free but it was too tight.
The two men fixed the collapsible stools on the sand, opened beer bottles, placed a towel between the stools, and Murphy cut the pack of cards and dealt two hands face down on the towel. Heslin turned the transistor high and drank the first of the bottles of beer. Behind them the black cat struggled against the incoming tide. An oldish, wiry man with a white terrier came on to the strand and seemed to notice the struggling cat. As he approached, Murphy and Heslin turned their stools to face him directly, lifted their beer bottles and put the transistor up to its full volume. The man paused and then, very reluctantly, turned away. A few times he looked back before leaving the beach. By then the black cat, through drowning or struggling or pure terror, floated about like any lifeless thing on the end of the line. The tide now washed around the stools, and the two moved further in as they continued playing cards and drinking. As they did so, they looked back for a long time at the incoming tide, but they weren’t able to pick out the cat being tossed about on any of the low waves.
*
Murphy and Heslin kept moving in, letting the tide take their empties. When the strand was half-filled, two curraghs were taken by a group of men from the concrete hut and carried upside down to the water. There were four men to each curragh. The men’s heads and shoulders were covered by the black canvas so that the curragh looked like an enormous insect with eight legs advancing into the water. There they floated the boats and fixed the oars in their pins, and a white nylon net was passed between them before they rowed apart. After they’d stretched the net, a man in each boat waved what looked like a crudely made spear to a watcher on the high cliffs, who blew a shrill whistle by way of recognition. Heslin and Murphy stopped playing cards to watch.
The crude spears were made from the leaves of old car springs, sharpened to a blade and attached to the long poles. The men were fishing for basking sharks. The watcher, high on the cliff, was able to see the shadow on the bright sand as soon as the shark entered the bay, and through a series of whistles was able to tell the men in the boats where the shark was moving. Obeying the whistles, they rowed in a wide arc until they had encircled the shark with the pale net, and then they drew the net tight. They killed the shark with the homemade spears. What they had to be most careful of as they thrust the spear into the flesh was the shark’s tail: a single flick would make matchwood of the boats. They could sit out there in the boats without anything happening for days on end, and then two or three sharks could come in during the course of a single evening.
Murphy and Heslin watched the boats for some time as they bobbed listlessly on the water, the men resting on their oars with occasional strokes to keep their position, but as nothing appeared to be happening they went back to playing cards. They kept moving in ahead of the tide, playing for small stakes, till they had the six-packs drunk. The tide was three-quarters full, but still the men rested on the oars in the boats out on the bay without anything happening. It was easier now to make out the watcher high on the clif
f.
‘I wonder what the fuck they’re waiting about there in the boats for,’ Murphy said.
‘I don’t know and I couldn’t care less,’ Heslin said fiercely as he slapped down a winning card.
The two men then decided to have a last game. Whoever lost would buy the drinks in Gielty’s on the way back. Then they folded the stools and towel and put them into the canvas bag. Several cars passed them as they climbed the hill up to the main road. As there was an evening chill in the breeze, they put on and buttoned up their shirts. It was very dark in Gielty’s after the sealight. They ordered pints of stout, and Heslin paid.
‘Would you fancy a second?’ Murphy offered as they rose to leave.
‘No. We have the whole night to get through yet,’ Heslin said. ‘And if we hit fish we better be able to reel them in.’
They rose and left the bar and walked back down to the village. A white Mercedes stood in front of the cottage. Further up the small stream a boy was dabbling a worm in one of the larger pools.
‘They must be rich,’ Heslin said as they walked nonchalantly past the cottage.
‘Wouldn’t you just love to send them a video of what happened to the fukken cat?’ Murphy replied.
Mrs Waldron missed the cat as soon as she came through the gate, so constant was her wait by the escallonias. She looked at the stone in the stream and saw the boy fishing, and then about the house, and thought no more about it. Perhaps she had caught a mouse or a bird and was sleeping somewhere. In the excitement of Eileen’s return, the cat was forgotten. The presents she brought – a silk scarf, soft leather gloves and different kinds of mushrooms and herbs from a market in Rennes – had to be examined and admired. Readily, Eileen answered her mother’s questions about the towns she’d stopped in, the hotels, the restaurants, the markets, the shops, châteaux, museums, cathedrals, but there was a slowness in the responses, as if something weighed on her mind. Seeing this, her mother concentrated on the preparations for dinner, content to wait. Over the sea trout, mushrooms and the bottle of dry white wine she’d brought back from Nantes, Eileen spoke about what had been on her mind since her return.
Creatures of the Earth Page 34
