Blue Mercy: A Novel.

by Ross, Orna

  She took it as a figure of speech, but I was working on a logical ratio. Given that being five minutes late home from school could bring on a beating that might last twenty minutes, sneaking out a window to a dance was surely putting my life in danger. I could feel the blows and the form they would take if I was caught.

  Yet I went. Something bigger than our small selves kicks up in adolescence, or in a certain type of adolescent. I cringe now when I recall the ferocity I brought to those teenage romances of mine. As a teenager, I had already experienced a series of them, each blazing through me with its own particular and ridiculous fervor. I'd like to deny half of it, pretend I was never like that, but back then each new male was a potential Him. Oh, how I stoked those yearnings, each boy a funnel for the thoughts and feelings I was not allowed to indulge for their own sake. Passion's passion for itself.

  So there I was, risking I knew not what for the dubious pleasures of Molina dancehall, my teenage-girl radar scanning the room. Brendan must have felt my burning eyes on him, because he turned -- cigarette still in his mouth -- to face me, and his eyes, half-closed to the rising smoke, popped open. I was regretting my choice of clothing: a sleeveless dress covered in big red roses and cinched at the waist with a red belt -- it felt far too innocent to attract a boy like him -- but no, it was okay. He was crushing his cigarette underfoot and walking across, the prospect switching on his smile.

  Skinny and heavy-chinned, Brendan wasn't the best looking guy in the world -- or even in Molina Dancehall -- but, oh, that smile of his. His teeth were white and perfectly aligned, unusual in Ireland at the time, but it was more than that. The smile chased all the edgy moodiness out of his face and latched onto you, made you feel like you were what drove his bad times away.

  He spun me out onto the dance-floor and pulled me into his arms. Within an hour he was telling me how he hated Wicklow and the whole godforsaken, damp, dump of a country we lived in and I was telling him things about my home-life that I had never told Pauline or anyone else.

  Next day, I met him at the end of our lane where he was waiting on his Honda with two helmets. Yes, he had a motorbike. And a leather jacket. And a guitar.

  He taught me how to drink Guinness and how to roll a joint. He took me on a picnic and fed me food from his hand. He brought me to the cinema and spent the two hours watching me instead of the movie and afterwards told me how he had loved seeing the lights and colors on my face.

  And I loved how he was astonishing himself with the telling. All the telling. There was nothing we did not tell each other. Or so it seemed at the time.

  So when -- just three months after we'd danced our first dance -- he asked me to go with him, to climb onto the back of his motorbike with all I owned and leave soggy, miserable Ireland once and for all, I went.

  I went because I wanted him, and because of the miracle of him wanting me. That was the pull, but there was also the push. The making of dinner and the washing of clothes and the study for my Leaving Certificate in my father's kitchen table while he sat at his bureau dealing out his complaints and calling out prices. Tea: one shilling and six. Butter: two shillings. Eggs: one and eight. The cost of feeding me, in the pounds, shillings and pence of those days, read out from his black notebook.

  Brendan was my breakout clause, doing for me what I couldn't do for myself.

  At my request, the birthing pool was brought closer to the window and Snakeskin and I got naked in the water, except for a tank top over my breasts, while the others formed a "circle of love" around us, with Zane playing guitar and the rest singing along, beating hand-drums, or pots, or rapping spoons. Every so often, one of the girls would get up to boil a kettle of water and carefully tip it in to the pool to keep us warm.

  What Jade had promised me came to pass: I had birth pains, but in the water they were bearable -- more than bearable: effective. Essential. The day faded to darkness. The stars came out to shine.

  "I've changed my mind," I said to Snakeskin between two sets of contractions. "Let's call her Starlight."

  Sounds were rising in me: universal, female sounds. My breaths became gasps, my whimpers turned to wails. Soon all I could hear was my own pulse, breathing and crying. I dissolved into nothing but mother-body: source, vessel, channel, bringer, giver. Jade mopped my brow, Brendan held my hand, Emma brought me drinks of water and glasses of iced tea.

  It had been two years since we left Doolough, with nothing to our names but his bike and twelve pounds, eight shillings and ninepence. First came a short stint in London, but we quickly gave up on England, where it was so hard to be Irish.

  We sold the bike and flew to New York. A Brooklyn summer was followed by our best time, when we bought a VW van, painted it up and kitted it out with bed and camper stove. Down the East Coast we drove -- Cape Cod, the Carolinas, Sarasota, across to New Orleans -- picking up bits of work as we went. Brendan drew pictures and strummed songs, including some of his own, on his guitar. I wrote poems in a brown, leather-bound notebook.

  Then we drove back to the coast and northwards again, as the returning sun grew too hot for our Irish skins.

  Just when we were wondering where we'd go next, we saw a report about groups of what the journalist called "beatniks" convening in San Francisco. The next day we set off west for California, via New Mexico. It was on a wet afternoon, plump with rain freezing towards snow, that we arrived in Taos, with an introduction to a friend of a friend.

  We drove up a long dirt road lined with olive trees, as instructed, to be told that the friend was long gone but that we were welcome anyway to stop the night. Almost a year on, here we were, still.

  "Not long now. Not long."

  My skin stretched, tauter than skin can be stretched, and I screamed with the searing heat of the rip. The head was through.

  A slither through the soreness, and then a cry. Smaller than the cries I'd been making, something far more faint and fragile. Yet the room was turned towards it.

  "A girl," Jade said, with her serene smile.

  She placed her on my belly. The baby's eyes were glazed but she looked at me and I looked at her, both of us astonished. A look not of my world, but of hers, the world she'd more recently left.

  Snakeskin was observing us, proud but lost. The outsider, for once, and not liking it.

  The cord was cut by somebody, I don't know who, and I pulled the baby in closer. The rapid rise and fall of her breath made my insides clench.

  "Look," Jade said. "She has a birthmark."

  We looked. On the back of her neck, just below a fringe of dark hair lining the base of her skull, was a wine-colored smudge, about the size of a bean, but five-sided. Almost like a star.

  Madeira took up her guitar and started to play, a song of Joni Mitchell's, a favorite with us all.

  "You are stardust," I whispered in the baby's ear. "Golden."

  The morning after the funeral, Star and I sat in her little hire car. She had allowed herself to be persuaded to stay one more day by the prospects of a trip to Glendalough. It was a morning that the Irish winter occasionally throws up, just when you despair that the ceiling of grey has turned solid: a day that seemed to have wandered backwards out of springtime, with a clear-blue sky and golden light. A gift of a day.

  I breathed deep, trying to inhale some of its tranquility. We were climbing, the little engine whining as we negotiated the bends. More accustomed to an automatic, Star kept crunching the gearstick. As we topped the crest, a bog-plain opened out, miles of tufted peat and raw earth on all sides.

  "What do you think of the scenery?" I asked.

  "Sure, it's pretty."

  It was the wrong word for the ruggedness of this part of Wicklow, but nothing was going to dampen my mood. We were together, my daughter and I. We were taking a day trip. I hadn't told her where we were going, just instructed her to take the Military Road.

  "What time do you think we'll be back?" Star asked

  "I'm not sure. I thought we'd make a day of it, have a spo
t of lunch?"

  "I have to leave in the afternoon."

  "Oh."

  "Mom, don't give me 'oh'. You know. I told you."

  "But not where you're going."

  She hesitated. "Mount Mellaray Abbey."

  "What?"

  "A monastery in County Waterford," she said.

  "I know what it is. It's well known." An enclosed order of Cistercians on the bare, windblown slopes of Knockmealdown Mountains. "Star, are you sure?"

  "I'd better tell you. In March, I'm going to be Confirmed."

  It was so long since I heard the word used in this context that for a minute I failed to recognize it. "Confirmed?" I repeated, puzzled. Then I realized. "Confirmed as a Roman Catholic?"

  "Yes. I've been going to Mass and taking classes."

  "Since when?"

  "Since...Oh, a long time."

  Star was baptized for the same reason her father and I got married: because, in the 1970s, nuns and priests and Christian Brothers provided what was considered the best public education in America. We couldn't afford to pay school fees, but we wanted the best for our darling, so we decided to capitalize on our Irish Catholic backgrounds. We married and had Star baptized Maria Bernadette, the name she took through school and college and out into the world, but to us she was always Star.

  And though she got plenty of Jesus, Mary and holy St Joseph at school, at home we counterbalanced it with our secular view of life.

  She moved from the church as from all aspect of her childhood, became angry and rebellious, but also a thinker, intelligent and introspective. A punk rocker for a while. How could somebody like that sign up for the self-serving, conservative and duplicitous Roman Catholic Church? Her father would have cried to hear of it, and I couldn't help but think it was just another way to get at us. At me.

  "I'm always surprised when young people sign up for organized religion," I said.

  "I'm not asking your permission, Mom. I'm just telling you."

  "I didn't mean..." I let my explanation trail away. It wasn't important, not beside our other differences. I would also ignore this insistence that she had to leave today. She had said that yesterday too, but I had managed to get her to stay on.

  "You'll be interested in where we are going then," I said. "Glendalough was once the Christian capital of Ireland."

  We began our descent into the sheer-sided, wood-covered valley that cups the two elongated lakes that give this ancient place its name. As Star and I emerged from the parking lot by the lake, the mountains seemed to have reared up around us. The distant, humming rush of Poulnapass Waterfall underlined the hazy silence. It settled on me and I felt my muscles unclench.

  Star was finally impressed. "Wow! This place is something."

  We set off. My daughter was no walker. Because of her size, she was propelled not by her legs but by her belly, her steps somehow delicate as well as full of effort, as if the force of gravity was precarious for her. I knew each pace she took brought her discomfort and that, in a few moments, her forehead would be lined with a sheen of sweat.

  Yet it was good for her to walk, surely? Not to give in to her disinclination? I fell into slow step beside her.

  Groups and couples passed us in their colored rainwear, their faces ruddy with fresh air, nodding and smiling. I took her up the back way, through the ruins, the remains of cloisters and chapels left over from the monastic heyday.

  "That round tower is something," she said, as we stood at the base of it, looking up. "What was it for?"

  "A beacon for pilgrims. A bell tower. A refuge when the Vikings came to plunder."

  "Hard to imagine plundering Vikings now. It's so peaceful."

  And it was. That's why I want to write about it here, now. We walked around the sacred stones put down to mark the ground we walked upon as holy and, for more than thirty minutes on that morning before she left, before the worst became known and the police came calling, the two of us were wholly at peace.

  But then, on the way back, I made the mistake of driving home through Laragh.

  "Laragh," Star said, as we passed the road sign. "Laragh...?"

  "Yes. If you drive on through the village and turn --"

  "Laragh? Isn't that where Dad came from?"

  I had forgotten she knew that. I had half-forgotten I knew it myself. "Yes, it is."

  "Oh my God, Mom, you are unbelievable!" She jerked the car to a stop, making the car behind us hoot.

  "Star!"

  "Don't you think, Mom," she was speaking slowly, like I was a child. Or an idiot. "Don't you think I might be a tad interested in seeing the house where my father grew up?"

  "Gosh, honey, I don't think I even know where your dad's home place is. Once before I tried to find it, from his description, but I couldn't be sure..."

  "But not to even say."

  "I'm sorry." Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry... "All right then," I said. "Let's try. Let's see if we can find it."

  I directed her to turn at the bridge, near the old mill, and we drove up to the house that I believed might have belonged to Brendan's family. We parked a little beyond, walked back to look at it. A bungalow, low and squat, without a single attractive feature except the shrubberies.

  "The garden's pretty, isn't it?" I said. "Even at this time of year. Somebody in there has green fingers."

  "I think we should go in," Star said.

  "Absolutely not."

  "Oh, come on, Mom. Why not?"

  "I'm not even sure that it's the right house. If it is, they could well be dead by now. And even if not, what on earth do you think we can go in there and say? 'Oh hi! I was married to your son, the one who left when he was eighteen and never contacted you again. This is your granddaughter. Nice to meet you.'"

  "But, Mom, they don't know whether he is alive or dead. Whatever happened, that's just not right."

  "I know, honey. But going in there and putting the heart crossways in a mother or father who must be in their seventies by now is not going to give your dad's sad story a happy ending."

  "But..."

  "It's too late, Star."

  "No. Don't say that. I hate those words."

  "If you want to do this, you'll have to do it another day. On your own."

  "Or on my own, now."

  "Okay. Give me the keys and I'll wait for you in the car."

  She rummaged in her bag, handed them across. I turned and began to walk back down the hill. I hadn't got far when she called me. "Stop. Wait."

  I turned.

  "Maybe you're right," she puffed, as she caught up.

  "You could write to them first. That might be an approach."

  "I probably won't even do that. As usual I'm a funk."

  "You just want to know more about him." I took her arm. She let me and I gave it a squeeze. "It's natural."

  But that only set her off again. "Why didn't you tell me more when I was growing up, Mom? Why did you keep it all from me?"

  "Star, I've admitted that was a mistake. I did what I thought was best."

  "It wasn't."

  "I know. You've said. And I'm sorry."

  Over and over: the same thing. Was she never going to let it go? These reproaches were the flip side to the excessive love she used to lavish on me when she was little: "I love you, Mommy," holding my head in place with her two little hands, so I couldn't look away from her.

  Twice in my life I had wronged her, she believed. The first time with her father and in her mind, our recent travails were connected with that. A connection she would never explain and I could never fathom.

  I realized I was going to have to say something, take hold of the subject we were both avoiding. "This isn't just about Brendan, is it?"

  "Mom, don't. I'm warning you, just don't."

  "I gave him up for you, Star. He's gone." There it was, out in the open.

  She snatched back her arm, looked around herself, as if for a door she could escape through and slam behind her.

  "Why does that mean no
thing, Star? I don't know what else to do."

  "Okay, Mom, that's it. This sham of a day is now officially over."

  "I know it's hard for you to talk about it, honey. But we have to. Please."

  "Dr Aintree told me this would happen." I was hardly listening. She knew I liked Amanda Aintree, her therapist, a good doctor. And a good woman. I felt she was just using her against me and all my mental attention was on trying to find persuasive words that might work, might melt the hardness between us so we could communicate. Until I heard her say, "She warned me. Told me you were likely to annihilate me again."

  "Annihilate you?"

  "We are driving home now, Mom, and then I am going to pack and leave as planned."

  "Annihilate you, Star? You have got to be joking. Annihilate?"

  On the drive back to Doolough from Glendalough, Star turned on the radio so we wouldn't have to talk. Back at the house, I said to her, "Will you help me clear away your Granddad's things before you go?" If I could get her to hold off until darkness, she might stay another night.

  She didn't want to but she could hardly say no, so we set to it, working through the house with boxes and black plastic sacks, separately and in silence, like burglars.

  It's surprising the amount of detritus that even the least accumulative life can gather, but my father was a hoarder. He hadn't smoked for years before he died, but he'd kept all his old pipes in a shoe box. Of footwear, old and new, I counted seventy-eight pairs: wellington boots, walking boots, best shoes and second-best and long, long past their best. Wardrobes and cupboards stuffed with clothes and knick-knacks. Ornaments and pictures, brass plates and candlesticks, holy water fonts and ancient bedside lamps.