Blue Mercy: A Novel.

by Ross, Orna

  Since hearing this news, I had got it into my head that Yeats - and Iseult - might be leading me back. Back to the home I'd escaped from as a teenager on the back of a Honda 100. Back to my father, my mother, the mess of my origins. Back to mad Ireland.

  Doolough. Laragh. Glendalough. London. Paris. Dublin. Just the names were enough to send a shiver of excitement through me. And Star saying that, about not having any family, felt like another sign pointing me towards Europe.To get there, I'd have to work a double-shift twice a week, and take on any other overtime that was going, then see if I could wangle three weeks off -- and juggle one or two other things too.

  "Mom, for God's sake, tell me. You're scaring me.

  "We do have other family, Star. You have a grandfather. He's in Ireland. I'll take you to see him if you want."

  PAULINE. CHRISTMAS EVE 1989.

  PAULINE. CHRISTMAS EVE 1982

  Witness Statement of Mrs Pauline Whelan

  As dictated to Garda Joe Cogley, Rathdrum Barracks, Co Wicklow

  Dec 29th 1989.

  Just after 1 p.m. on Christmas Eve, I went to look in on Mr Martin Mulcahy as I had been doing for the past number of years, ever since his second wife died. More recently, I'd been hired by the Mulcahy family -- namely Mrs Mercy Maria Creahy, née Mulcahy -- to give nursing care five times a week. I visited at 11.45 a.m. approximately.

  I found the victim in good form, considering his health status, though perhaps a little more tired than usual. He complained of a number of ailments, but that was not unusual, and he also had many other complaints, some of which were imaginary in nature, including that somebody was feeding him poisonous concoctions, trying to 'do away with him'. He accused his daughter, and also his granddaughter newly arrived from America, and also Mr Zach Coleman, lately of Santa Paola, California, who had been staying in the house.

  He often made accusations of this nature and I did not, and still would not, take them seriously.

  After seeing the patient, I spent some time with Mrs Creahy in the kitchen, as was customary during my visit. We had lunch and talked about many subjects, including the care of her patient. She was tired and under strain. Her father needed constant care and she was very devoted.

  She told me that Mr Coleman had left some hours earlier and would not be returning.

  I left the house at approximately 2 p.m. and went directly to my own home at Doolough Upper, Co Wicklow.

  HOME |HŌM| [NOUN]

  1 the place where one lives permanently, esp. as a member of a family or household

  • the family or social unit occupying such a place.

  • a house or apartment considered as a commercial property.

  • a place where something flourishes, is most typically found, or from which it originates.

  • informal: a place where an object is kept.

  2 an institution for people needing professional care or supervision.

  3 Sports: the goal or end point

  • the place where a player is free from attack.

  *

  It is a dream. I am dreaming. It is an image I am imagining. Is it a memory too? I think I remember drifting upwards, through murky lake water, curving like a fish through the loops of previous risings. Strands undulating as I circle through them, round and up, up and round, holding my breath until I break the surface. My eyes open. I am awake.

  Awake in Doolough, for the first time in eighteen years. Light leaks in at the edges of the curtains, but early light by the look of it. No more than five or six a.m., I reckon, pulling my wrist out from under the covers to check. Yes, 5.42 and the sun is up already. The Irish summer night, lengthening now that it's August, but still short.

  I hoist myself off my pillow to look around. It's all so familiar and why not? I woke in this room for sixteen years of my life, and little has changed. The wooden ceiling and rafters, the big mahogany wardrobe and dressing-table stand out, sharp and new, vibrating for me as they would not had I stayed here. This must be how it feels when the bandages are removed after a cataract operation, when you see again as if for the first time, but also remember what you used to look at before. Both at once.

  The air is as familiar as the room: a chill in the atmosphere that's always there in Ireland, indoors and out, summer and winter. Doolough Lake. The lake is in the air, and so are the mountains, and the woodland, and the unfeasibly green grass.

  I slide from the bed and pad, barefoot, across the chilly floor to pick up yesterday's clothes from the chair. Suddenly, I cannot wait to be gone, to grab a slice of this early morning and make it mine. A quick brush of my teeth, then I look in on Star. I want out, but I don't want her to feel abandoned, not on our first morning. I stand over her in the dim light, listening to her breathing. Deep and even and likely to stay that way for hours. I scribble a note, leave it beside her head on the pillow. Then I tiptoe down the stairs and out the back door, down the pathway through the trees, towards the lake.

  Doolough Mountain oversees my path and the ring of mountains behind. Ballinedin, Cloughernagh, Carrrigasleggaun, Slievemaan, Lugnaquilla. Old friends: I never let myself miss them in California but I seem to be almost missing them here now they're in front of me, their blue hilly distance seeming to sigh the presence of all that is bigger and more mysterious than mundane little me.

  I feel it again, the effect they always had on me. I become aware of the birdsong and the sound of it makes me skip. It is spongy underfoot along the woodpath, as I bend into a tunnel of trees. I pick a sprig of pine and a shower of dew, or yesterday's rain, spatters my head and shoulders, making me laugh.

  The lake when I reach it is impassive, its quiet water lapping as it always did. Flitters of the dream I was dreaming come back to me. The fish. The feeling of being fished. My father used to bring me down here in summer sometimes. Fly fishing, of course, the only kind that warranted the name in his book. Coarse fishing was for boot-boys; any eejit could do it. Fly fishing took skill because a fly weighs almost nothing, so how do you propel it twenty or thirty feet into a lake?

  He showed me how: a complicated combination of the weight of the line itself, the flexibility of the rod and the casting action that sends the line into a perfect horizontal 'U' behind your back, then forward onto the water. "The whole thing is in that pause between back" -- he cast the line behind -- "and forward. The rod flexes behind -- see? -- and gathers the energy. Like that. Here, you try."

  I tried. I failed.

  "Stop snapping at it like a fairy wand," he said, but not cross. Down here he was a different Daddy.

  He showed me how to hold my wrist unnaturally straight. He showed me a variety of flies. He showed me how to tie knots. He showed me how to "play" a fish. Then he showed me how to do it. He caught a trout. It jerked and bounced at the end of the line.

  I had never seen anything fight for its life before. I wanted to shout at him to throw it back in, but I knew if I did, I'd never be brought again and I would lose this new, half-likeable father I was just -- maybe -- beginning to find. As it was unhooked and priested on my behalf, I fought the impulse to cry but as soon as I got back home, I went up to my room and sobbed for the fish. Even then, I think I knew that I was also sobbing for me, for my mother and, yes, even for my father.

  I must have been about eight, then, I think. It's hard to be sure. He brought me again, not often but often enough. I never liked it but I did like how concentrating on those square feet of water brought him an ease he never had anywhere else. You don't succeed at fishing until you calm down and accept what the weather and the water offer. You are in the hands of the unknown, of things that you can't see.

  But even down here at the lake, where he could be transfixed and transformed, he was still my father, the father who was there, yesterday, on our return. We were let in by Rose, his new wife, to find him standing at the fireplace, in the very place he used to stand, eighteen years ago (somehow, I had known that's where he would be) with the same bald, blotched head, same thick neck,
spilling over a too-tight collar, same trousers pulled high over his paunch by metal-clipped braces, same hefty posterior warming itself by the fire, uncaring that it blocked the heat for everybody else. I had expected the serge navy trousers of his policeman's uniform, the cap on the mantelpiece beside him, medallion shining. But, of course, he was long retired by now and dressed in civilian garb.

  The furniture and décor were just what I had left behind, too full, nothing touched, aside from a few accessories and the new bulky television in the corner. Except, of course, for the new wife, now standing what we'd known as my mother's fireside chair. She was an O'Leary from Carrawood and I heard afterwards that he had advertised in the local paper for her: Widower, Garda Sergeant, own house and land, seeks wife. And it was she, I knew, who had added the few bits of color and comfort that had found their way into the living room. She welcomed us and ushered us in: gladiators into the den.

  My father looked up from stuffing tobacco into his pipe, rested his eyes on me for a second, then moved them across to Star, to give her the full treatment, from crown to feet and back up again, with eyes that hadn't blunted with age. "Well, well, well," was what he said. "Look what the cat dragged in."

  The trees draw in around me. The sky is growing light as the sun climbs out from behind the hills to the east, drowning out the stars, and the lake is a mirror this morning, allowing the mountain to admire itself. So very quiet, as if it was waiting for me all this time, and now is hushed and attentive. I sit on a log and listen to its lap-lap-lap, as I did when I was a child. I breathe deep, sucking in air, as if I could suck its peace in through my pores. The lake is blameless.

  Such a thing for him to say. Oh, what had I done? Delivered myself and my daughter unto the enemy, forgotten what it took to leave and lock that door on him. His refrains from the long length of my childhood come colliding down the tunnel of time.

  How would you like to be packed off to the orphanage?

  Oh no, that wouldn't suit you, no, because ones like you always know what side their bread is buttered.

  The nuns wouldn't put up with your carry-on for a minute, they wouldn't be long putting manners on you.

  And now: Look what the cat dragged in.

  "Would you listen to him?" Rose cut in, all bustle and distraction. "And he so looking forward to you coming."

  "It's good to see you, Daddy," I said, anxious like Rose to move us off the insult. "You look well."

  He looked the same. Exactly the same. How could that be, eighteen years on?

  He didn't answer me.

  Rose said: "Come in girls, come in now. You must be dying for a cup of tea."

  Tea: one shilling and six. Butter: two shillings. Eggs: one and eight. Sausages...

  "Could I have coffee?" Star said.

  Rose's hand fluttered to her chest. "Coffee. Oh dear. Do we have coffee? Do you know, I don't think we do."

  "Then tea will be fine," I said.

  "No, no, let me check. There might be a jar at the back of the press."

  "Really, there's no need..."

  "But Mom," Star whispered to me, as Rose was gone and my father had bent over to put coal on the fire so he wouldn't have to talk to us. "You know I don't drink tea."

  "Try," I hissed back.

  Rose seemed kind and I was immediately drawn to shield her. She was very like what I imagine my mother was, from stories told by Pauline's mother and others. He must have had a nose for women who could take what he doled out. The sin of my leaving was still rigid in him, as hard as the fire-iron he was clattering around the grate, as hot as the day I left. Somebody was going to be made suffer. I feared for me and Rose but mostly for Star, who had no idea what it was like to be so treated. What had I done?

  "I'm awful sorry now about that," said Rose, coming back in. "I never thought of coffee. We don't take it at all. Will you have a glass of minerals...em...Star? I got some in especially for yourself."

  "Soda," I explained to Star. "That would be lovely," I said, smiling at Rose.

  Star folded her arms, stretched out her legs and yawned, making me tense. He wouldn't like that. In his presence, young people sat up straight. Rose returned and we sat with the drinks, the two of us upholding most of the talk. The length of the journey. The couple of nights we had in London. How you couldn't beat a musical for a good night out. The size of London and the busyness of it and how did anybody manage to live there at all. The journey from Dublin Airport. The beauty of Wicklow.

  A couple of times, a silence fell, and the clink of spoons and tap of cup onto saucer grew loud between us, but we made it safe to the far side of tea. Once finished, Daddy -- still silent -- went up the fields and Rose saw us upstairs.

  "My old room," I said, as she led us in.

  "Your Daddy thought that would be nice for you," Rose said, but I knew it was she who had had the thought.

  I walked into the room. Same windows looking out over the front drive. Same dressing-table. Same bed. Could it actually be the same bedspread? The only thing that had changed was that there were now two big mahogany wardrobes in the room, not one.

  "And Maria," she said, leading Star back out into the corridor. "You are here, next door to your mam."

  I put my bag on the bed and opened one of the wardrobes. It was full of old clothes that smelled of mothballs and the past. One dress wrapped in cellophane -- jade blue, my favorite color -- stood out. I pulled at it and, when I saw what it was, a memory tumbled out: my mother, bent for days over her sewing machine, taking in the seams on this dress. And she and my father side by side, smiling down at me, dressed up for a rare night out. The Garda Ball? Was that right, or was I inventing? His neck, too red, bulging over a white collar and tie I certainly remember, and the shock of my mother with bare shoulders and hair piled on top of her head, looking like somebody else.

  "What do you think?" she'd asked, turning slowly around so I could admire her, but the dress showed part of her that I'd never seen and something about her half-naked back frightened me and I started to cry.

  "Oh now," she'd said. "What's that about?" She was laughing down at me and up at my father. Happy.

  Where had this memory come from? I was sure I'd never had it before, yet already it felt like part of me.

  "That old wardrobe was put in from the other bedroom," Rose said from behind to me, making me jump. "I hope it won't be in your way."

  "Of course not."

  "It's such a lovely dress."

  I looked down at it, then back up at her, the ghost of its owner hovering between us.

  "You should bring it back to America with you; get a bit of wear out of it."

  "Oh, I couldn't."

  "Why not?"

  I looked at it. Indeed, why not? It was beautiful: a tight, strapless bodice covered in tiny, worked detail over a full skirt. The sort of detail you rarely get now, and far too beautiful to be left to rot here. But where would I wear such a dress?

  "Just don't say anything to your Daddy," she said, dropping her voice to a whisper. "You know how he likes to hold onto everything."

  So that was how she played it, us against Him. Fair enough, you'd need some survival strategy to live with my father.

  "All right then, I'll take it. Thank you Rose."

  "Not at all. So tell me, have you everything you need?"

  "I'd love a shower," said Star, coming in behind us.

  "Oh dear, I'm afraid we don't have one of those."

  "You don't have a...?" Star's face would have made me laugh but for poor Rose's discomfiture.

  I cut in. "Maybe a bath? I'll show you the bathroom."

  "A bath?" said Rose. "Oh, dear me, yes, of course. I'll just need an hour or two to heat up the immersion."

  It had become clear that mealtime was the only time we were going to be getting with my father or Rose. Their life was going to go on as usual, with no concession to us. Fair enough, that suited us too. I wanted Star to come with me to Dublin, to hear me speak at the book launch. I wante
d to take her shopping and to visit the capital city I'd hardly ever seen, do the sightseeing, touristy things with her.

  To have had Daddy sitting in the front seat of our hired car for all that would have been too awkward. If they wanted to stay put, it left Star and me free to explore wherever we wanted.

  Except Star was having none of it. Not even my launch. She was refusing to go.

  "Who would I talk to? It will be full of whiny critics and up-their-own-ass professors." She shuddered.

  Star loathed critics ever since our local paper's music column savaged Vixen, with a line about their particular sound of fury signifying nothing and picking Star out for special opprobrium: "The drummer was a big -- let's be honest, fat -- girl in spandex and combat boots, with a sense of rhythm as idiosyncratic as her sense of fashion". It wasn't that harsh, compared to what could be said, but Star was so sensitive.

  "There will be other people there, ordinary people, nice people."

  "You'll be busy and I'll have no-one to talk to."

  My moment of glory wasn't exactly scintillating for a fifteen-year-old, I did realize that. For anyone, really. It was only a small essay in an ancillary volume by a subsidized press, but it was publication, recognition that what I had to say was worth hearing by somebody. I tried another tack.

  "What will you do here, while I'm gone? I'll be staying in Dublin overnight."

  She shrugged that jerk of her shoulders that was almost a sneer. "I guess talk to Rose."