An hour or so later, they came to a lake, an oval of startling deep blue. Séamus sat on a tuft of heather and moss. He motioned to Theo to do the same.
“This is far enough. We’ll head back in a minute. How’s yer head now? Clearer?”
Theo was about to snap a retort but the old lad was right. He nodded.
“So, d’ye know much about the history of this place? No? I thought as much. Ye see those reeks of turf there? On the other side of the lake?”
Theo nodded again. The tightly packed triangles stood dark against the all-seeing hills that shaded from blue to silver-grey as the clouds spun past the sun.
“During the war, the real war against the Brits, Irish fighters used to hollow them out and hide inside. My dad was one of them, God rest his soul. Those nights in the reeks gave him a dreadful cough. It kept at him ’til his dying day. But the reeks were good places to hide other things too: guns, any kind of contraband, really. I used them myself back in the day. I’ve probably a few guns I’ve forgotten in reeks round here,” he chuckled. “D’ye have turf where you come from?”
“I come from Dublin. So no.”
“No need to get yer knickers in a twist,” Séamus said. “I’m only asking a civil question and mind, ye’re happy enough to sleep in my house and eat my food so you shouldn’t be getting all hot and bothered over a few little questions. I know you’ve come from Dublin now, but where ye grew up, did they have turf there?”
Theo shook his head. “I grew up in Dublin mostly. But if you’re asking where I was born, I was born in Rwanda. I came here when I was seven.”
“Ah, so that’s where yer from.”
Theo shook his head but he didn’t have the energy to pull that piece of nonsense apart. What did it even mean? And what could it really tell you at the end of the day? Did everyone here believe in geography as destiny? As though the place you were born determined who you were. Better to ask: what have you seen or where have you been? If you really wanted to know a person, surely these were the things to consider. Theo couldn’t reduce himself to ‘where are you from?’. It could never be answered. It should never be answered. It didn’t expand your knowledge, this question. It was a reduction, a way of hollowing you out with the spoon of the interrogation mark.
Séamus pulled a plastic bottle of orange squash from the pocket of his misshapen jacket, took a swig and handed it to Theo. It was too sweet but just what Theo needed after trekking across the bogs. He took a gulp, watching a flock of sheep grazing on the other side of the lake. Someone had splashed blue-and-red paint on the animals’ backs so they looked like carnival creatures, all dressed up with nowhere to go.
Séamus followed his eyes.
“Did ye have sheep in Rwanda? Were ye farmers?”
“No, my father was a teacher but we grew tea and maize and sweet potatoes. We didn’t have any sheep though.”
He knew he was building his own box now for Séamus to put him in. African, foreign, different. No matter that he spoke English, no matter that he was on the run from a Dublin drug gang, no matter that he spoke Irish better than Séamus’ own daughter. And sure, there was some truth in the box. It just wasn’t big enough.
The sun slipped behind a cloud and the grasses growing out of the lake curved and bowed like ballet dancers as a gust of wind sallied out of nowhere. Shaggy cloud-shadows scrabbled across the mountains. Aside from the wind, and the distant burble of birdsong, it was so quiet.
“I come here to this lake a fair bit,” Séamus said, rubbing his hands together. “Ye know, there’s a legend goes with this place. They say a beautiful girl threw herself into the lake rather than marry the rich man her father had chosen for her. She was in love with a poor boy, ye see, but the father was having none of it. Nothing much ever changes, does it? Money rules. Anyway, the story goes that you can whisper your darkest secrets into the water here and they’ll be lifted from ye and kept safe down below there, just like the poor girl’s love for the unsuitable boy has been kept safe underneath all these years.”
Theo said nothing. He just sat staring at the water, thinking of Neville and the secrets he took with him, as the wind traced its fingers across the surface.
“It doesn’t have a name on the map. Most of the lakes round here don’t, there’s too many, but my dad used to call this one Loch an Cháillte, for the lost girl, her lost love, and the secrets we could lose in here.”
“Did you bring Deirdre to this lake when she was a child? I don’t remember her talking about it.”
The words slipped out before Theo could screen them. It was the silence: it let you think, and then your mouth took over. Séamus looked surprised and then put-out.
“Did ye talk a lot, then? I thought ye just worked together. I thought, maybe, Deirdre felt sorry for you. She’s always had too big a heart, that one.”
“We’re friends, I suppose,” Theo said slowly. “We talked a lot, about everything really. She’s a good listener, not nosy like a lot of people, not looking for an angle, just because I’m black, like. She told me a bit about growing up round here, her mam, walking in the fields, that kind of thing. So I just wondered if you’d ever brought her here.”
Séamus was staring at him now and Theo could see the harder man inside the old one, the man who spread silence through his home like other people spread laughter. But then he coughed, lowered his head, and there was something about the way his hands hung huge, limp and dark-stained on his knees that made Theo think the old man might’ve been looking for the laughter too down all those years.
“No, I never brought her here. Nor her brother, Cian. This has always been my place. I told my secrets here, and made my atonements, and that was nobody else’s business.”
“So what am I doing here?” Theo said.
Séamus stood up.
“I thought ye might like to dump yer own secrets in here before we head back. It’ll lighten your load. You’re not the first to have killed a man or to have told the lake about it. The deaths at my hands, I’ve dropped them all in here. Even the ones that had to happen, the people who couldn’t be saved, the ones who wanted to die, whether they knew it or not.”
He took a few steps towards the water, stumbling a little on the uneven, soggy ground.
“My Sarah’s secret’s in there too. I suppose Deirdre told you about her mam’s cancer, how she was taken from us? I bet them’s the words she used too: taken from us. That’s what we say, isn’t it? Sarah wasn’t taken though. Nobody could take that woman, she was strong as an ox in her own way, even at the end. No, she wanted it and I always tried to give her what she wanted. God knows, I didn’t always succeed but I did try, even at the very end. So, that was another thing for me to throw in here.”
He was at the very edge of the lake now. Slowly, he bent down, put his hand in the water, and then rubbed his glistening fingers over his face.
“This is my rite of forgiveness. I’ve no time for the church. If I want absolution, this’ll be the only place I come. Sarah didn’t blame me. She begged me to end it but then, of course, ye always wonder was there a last-minute change of heart? But there’s a moment, a second really, when it’s too late for that. And when that moment is gone, ye can ask the question no more. I’ll have to live with never knowing.”
He straightened up again and there was a sheen on his mottled cheeks.
“We’d our problems through the years, alright, but I think I did right by her when it really mattered. I had to believe that anyhow, just to get through the days. Some days were harder than others. I know the kids suffered but I did what I could. That’s all we can do and the sooner we realise it the better. Mind you, that secret stays here,” he said, wagging his finger at Theo.
“Even if ye do get back to Dublin, back to Deirdre, you’ll not breathe a word of what was said here. Now, I’ll leave ye a minute in case ye have anything to say. This is the only help I’m able to give you, lad. What happens next, well, that’s your problem. But maybe you’ll deal wit
h it better if ye name your faults here and let them go.”
He started walking back the way they’d come, heading into the sun, so that he became his own shadow.
“Mind you, they also say that if ye drink from the lake, ye’ll be rich, and that hasn’t happened to me yet,” he shouted back. He laughed and shook his head, never slowing his step.
This is bleedin’ ridiculous, Theo thought. He’d nothing to say here, he didn’t want or need absolution. He needed a solution, a way to get back his life. Séamus was clearly losing the plot and no wonder living out here on his own. He might not even know what he was talking about. He was well old after all. What did he mean by doing right by his wife? Wasn’t that always the way cancer patients died? An overdose of painkillers from someone who couldn’t bear to see them suffer any longer. Still, Séamus hadn’t said anything about pills and he did have the look of a man who might find it in himself to hold a pillow down over the face of someone he loved.
Theo was about to get up and follow Séamus when another gust of wind made the water shiver. A flock of crows exploded from a bunch of thin trees in the distance, cawing, wheeling, a murder of movement. In the quiet, Theo could hear the grasses rubbing against each other and suddenly he was back in the swamp, buried up to his eyes in the mud. Around him the papyrus was swaying and now the rain had started and the soft plops drew a curtain over the distant sounds of whistles and whooping and machetes being banged on trees and screaming. Theo squeezed his eyes and spun back further, to the roadside and the ditch where he was crouching with his family. There were the lights he had seen a million times and could never explain. There were the voices that would forever remain disembodied, set free from man and meaning, and there was his father, his arm raised, the machete solid as a shadow in a bright room.
Theo could feel the sweat on his brow but he couldn’t tell if it was now or then. He was breathing fast but was it here or there? He breathed out slowly, taking the air from the dark place where his memories were stored. This time he did not fight. His fear that reliving that moment would somehow poison him didn’t matter any more because the worst had already happened. He had killed, as his father had killed. He’d already fulfilled his destiny so what else was there to fear? Theo let the images flicker on the screen behind his eyes.
There was Shema, eyes wide, lying on the ground. But this time, Theo could see more. His father was standing over Shema, as he always was, but now Theo could see the tears running down his face, and he saw that his father wasn’t looking at the older man on the ground. Theo followed his father’s eyes into the dark and out of the frame that had held this image until now. His father’s eyes took him to his mother, held tight by a tall man in a stained blue t-shirt and torn khaki trousers. The man had a knife to her neck and there was a string of dark blood already slipping onto the flowery cloth that covered little Angélique. His mother was trying to fold herself around the baby at her breast. The man tugged her arm, trying to break the human cocoon. His hair was matted, his eyes were huge, the whites shining like moons.
Theo heard a voice now, but it wasn’t the tall man. It came from outside even this expanded frame. And suddenly Theo recognised it. It had been echoing in his head for years but he’d never before been able to distinguish the words. The voice was wrapped in the sour smell of stale beer and the sharp, metallic scent of blood. It had always been speaking Kinyarwanda but this time, as though someone had turned a tuning dial in his head, Theo heard and understood the words.
“Thomas, we know you. You are one of us. But you know, this man, and your woman, they are cockroaches and you know what we have to do to the inyenzi. You can join us, run with the rubanda nyamwinshi, be part of the great majority as we take back what they have stolen from us. We will overlook your weakness in marrying one of them. You were bewitched, we have seen that elsewhere. It can be understood. But the zeros must be exterminated or they will take what is ours, as they have been doing all our lives. Thomas, you must choose now. This woman, and the beings with two heads, these snakes you call your children, they have no future. You can have a good future. We are all becoming rich now, we have food in our bellies, roofs on our houses, we have clothes, radios, cooking pots to take home every day.”
As the voice rang in his head, Theo saw his father flinch again and again as though the words were physical blows. He did not loosen his grip on the machete, it stayed above his head, but his shoulders dropped, and his head sunk into his chest as though someone was letting the air out of his body. And now he realised why he’d thought he recognised Neville’s moaning that day on the bench. It wasn’t just the keening tape at school. He’d heard it before that – it was the sound his father had made as he stood there, knowing everyone would die. It was the sound of the most terrible fear, the most terrible pain, and the most profound helplessness.
Now, Theo’s eyes fell on Shema again. He was looking straight at him and his mouth was moving and the need to understand what he was saying made Theo’s whole body arch and ache. Then it came.
“Theo, run! Run boy, get out. Go!”
Shema wasn’t asking for help. He had never been asking for help. Little Theo wanted more than anything to run. He could feel the horror of what was coming like a cold hand on his small neck. But he couldn’t move. Or could he? Sitting on a tuft of heather, at the edge of a lost lake, Theo breathed deeply again, willing the story to end and not end. He had never come this far but how much further? He squeezed his eyes and there it was: the end of everything. His father’s arm fell, the machete thudding dully onto the ground; his father launched himself across that impossible space between him and his wife but Florence’s lifeless body was already collapsing, blood spurting from her neck. Theo heard the thud of clubs breaking Shema’s bones, one by one, as the old man screamed. Then above it all, his father’s roars, grief and pain and fear woven together to make a sound that had echoed, unknowable, in Theo’s head ever since.
He opened his eyes. His face was wet and his chest was heaving. The sun was gone, the lake was still, the mountains unmoved. Theo stood up, went to the edge of the lake, dipped his hand in the water, and washed the tears from his face. Then, he turned and followed Séamus’ dwindling figure back across the bog, stumbling like a man woken from a deep sleep. He’d nearly caught the older man up when he realised there was one person, one voice, still missing from his recovered memory. Where had Clément been?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Deirdre could never quite remember the sequence of events that night. It was like when she drank too much and her brain turned off, clocking out discreetly and taking itself off to bed while her body partied on without it. She hadn’t drunk that much before Theo arrived at the door but maybe her brain thought she’d had enough trauma for one day and decided to blur the details to save her sanity.
For several hours, she completely forgot that Fergal had been about to lay into her again. It was only much later, when she was sitting in the squeak-filled, over-bright hospital corridor, twisting her hands, that she noticed the grazes and remembered falling in front of the fireplace. That was also when she remembered what’d happened to Neville. It seemed unthinkable but, until that moment, she had forgotten he was dead, forgotten that that was why Theo came to the door. All through the long hours of Fergal’s surgery she tried to piece the night back together, sifting through the mess in her head for a corner piece that would hold it all together.
Pauline had arrived at the same time as the ambulance. While the paramedics tried to stop Fergal’s bleeding, Pauline tried to pull Deirdre back into herself.
“Go,” Pauline whispered. “We’ll be fine here. Just go. And Dee, when the Gardaí come, listen to me now. When the Gardaí come, and they will, just cry and say you can’t talk to them, that you’re too upset. Do that whether… whatever happens. They’ll probably come here too but I’ll handle them.”
“But, the gun? What’ll we do with it, Pauline?”
“I’ll get rid of it. For now. I’ll
hide it. Don’t worry, Dee.”
Deirdre didn’t remember much of the ride to the Mater, just the banshee-wailing of the sirens setting her teeth on edge, threatening to scream her out of herself again. She hunched on the chair near Fergal’s head. A stocky female paramedic sat next to her, checking Fergal’s pulse, tapping machines and adjusting the tentacles of tubes that had sprouted from her husband’s arms and face. Deirdre knew she should feel distraught at the sight of Fergal bleeding out on the gurney, but she didn’t and she was sure the paramedic knew this. It was in the way she grimly avoided Deirdre’s eyes.
At the hospital, someone took her to a bleak corridor, sat her in a plastic chair, and gave her a hot cup of tea but she didn’t have the energy to drink it: to lift and tilt and swallow. It seemed like too much. She just sat with the cup in her hands, watching nurses and doctors speed-walk past, listening to the coughing and moans from the recovery rooms, feeling the endless ringing of a never-answered phone jangle through her bones.
At some point, as night gave way to day, she called her dad. She’d to try a few times before he answered. He didn’t have a mobile, of course, so he’d have had to get out of bed. The image of him stumbling on bare feet through that dark, cold house almost set her off again. She told him what had happened, more or less: that Theo was on the way, that it wasn’t his fault, that he needed help, and that she’d thought of her father because… she hesitated. “Because I panicked, and I knew you’d know what to do, Dad.”
Rain Falls on Everyone Page 24
