The Past

by Neil Jordan

  RATHER UNGAINLY ADULT clothes, blouses, skirts and dresses of your mother’s, which she has taken in. Her sumptuous, evening sense reflected in every garment so you could wear a velvet dress on a spring day, a strange mixture of ill-fitting and style. Your clothes make you suspect to the mothers of those who might possibly be your friends. So you learn to keep to yourself, you walk down by the stretch of marsh where the birds nest, over the railway line, over the granite ramp to the beach. You are the girl of thirteen with the large eyes and face, the halo of blonde hair, who walks along the railway tracks, stepping on the sleepers. On the beach, among the men in long coats who prod the flotsam with sticks, the young children playing truant from school. There is a woman who holds her belongings in a tied bundle, who sometimes sits by the granite wall. The wall slopes towards the beach, at an angle, to keep the tracks free of spring tides. The children and the lost elders sit there and the occasional sexual predator, generally male. You are the only adolescent girl to grace the granite. The flecks of silver and the mottles of white on the large fawn blocks reflect your hair and your eyes. It is an empty place, though never empty of people. The ramp stretches down the length of the track and yards separate those who sit on it, as if some rule of place keeps them apart; the two children looking through the sea-green bottle at the sun, the man with seven coats asleep in the spring heat, the youth with the ashplant, the high trousers and the slow eyes, following the children and the green bottle. Then there is you. The woman with the bundle intrigues you. She is wearing a grey shawl, like sackcloth. She unties the bundle slowly, unwraps yards of brown paper. You are looking directly at her, something one doesn’t do on the ramp and the weekday beach. She takes from the paper an evening dress and a pair of high-heeled shoes and a hat. The hat has mock fruit on top and the sprigs are twisted. The dress is crumpled, though still glittering with sequins. She takes off her shawl, then the garment under that, indistinguishable from her shawl, and lastly a stiff, coarse vest. You can see her withered breasts exposed to the sun as she holds the sequined dress to herself. She has a dowager’s hump and the ridges of her spine seem to push through her white skin. She struggles into the sequined dress and pulls it down around waist and thighs, pulling off the cloth she used as a skirt as she does so. Then she puts on the high-heels, dons the hat, turns to you with an unearthly, blissful smile.

  ‘How do they suit me?’

  You smile back in answer. You watch her stagger down the ramp, across the sand, towards the sea’s edge. She stands there like a thin, twisted bird, the sequins flashing in the sunlight, more sharply than the sea. She is staring at the thread of the horizon, motionless for several minutes, then suddenly she turns and walks back.

  ‘A bit loud, don’t you think?’

  You are about to reply that you don’t think so at all, but you see that she has made up her mind, she’s already struggling out of the dress, exposing her thin breasts again. So you smile in affirmation.

  YOU GIVE THAT sea front your occasional hours round your thirteenth year. The woman with the bundle returns with a different set of garments. Dapper old men wink at you, striding towards Blackrock. You look as odd, perhaps, as most of that ramp’s inhabitants, with your handed-down clothes and your air of abstraction, though the thought would never occur to you. Dreaming is a precious thing, at thirteen, on a near-empty beach. Never, I would say, does your mind form one abstract, separated thought. You souse yourself in the mechanics of dreaming, where one thought fades and leads to another and everything turns into everything else. The same breath blows through them, blowing deep, rising to the surface, then deep again. The wind raises a thread of sand and lets it fall. You get up and walk when the mood takes you, following the sand. A man accosts you one morning, a young man, so small and perfect that he could be called dwarf. He smiles at you from the granite. He is impeccably clean, his nails are long and perfectly groomed, his hair runs back from his forehead in thin waves. His small-boned, perfect face has the delicacy of an egg. His lips are tiny, somewhat sad, but his smile breaks his face into tiny creases, exposing even white teeth. He must be amazed when you smile back for he stutters when he calls you to the ramp.

  Wait with me, he tells you, for the train. His knees are drawn up and one hand rests on each. It carries an opera singer, he tells you, who will throw roses at anyone who stands and waves. Will you stand and wave? he asks. You walk a little up the ramp so that you can see the tracks. His hands flutter on his knees. Why, you ask him, will she throw out roses? Because she is famous, he tells you, she is famous, most beautiful and has a wonderful voice. If you are quick enough you can catch an armful of them. Red roses, white ones, all colours. Where will I stand? you ask. Here, he says, where she can see you. He stretches up, his small hand touches your thigh. Still, he says. His hand seems to shiver on the velvet. You obey it, don’t move. Will you show me your rose, he asks? I have no rose, you tell him, I will have to wait until the train comes. But you have, he insists, flashing his sad lips into a smile. You hear footsteps behind you on the granite and his hand trembles against you. You must watch for the train, he says softly, hastily, a little girl like you. He returns the hand to his knee. When will it come? you ask him, climbing the ramp to the top. Soon, he says, catch me some roses. You see him running backwards across the sand, his neat dwarf’s prints before him. Flashing his distant smile. Patience, he cries.

  22

  THAT IS NOT, however, to be read as your first sexual experience. Nothing but your curiosity was excited, which was perhaps fortunate, and your memory of the miniature man remains with you only because of the whiteness of his teeth and the neatness of his cuticles. You thought of nothing more significant than the train and the roses when he’d left you. The machine of adolescence had to wait to come, and the train with it.

  It needed Lili to meet you on the straw-coloured ramp, to cross the sand to the sea and back again. Lili comes in the more normal hours, the afternoon hours, when the place has lost its emptiness. There are comparative crowds then, schoolgirls, like Lili, in uniform. You walk down the tracks, you clamber over the sleepers, she holds your hand with one hand, presses down her blowing skirt with the other. She hints at that machine of the age beyond reason. You feel the world of intimacies, whispers and fluttering eyes. You are surprised and embarrassed since your world of adults has kept you a child, strangely innocent, innocently mature. You have stayed blissfully unaware of these long secrets of girlhood, which Lili seems to want to share. A blush, deep and rose-coloured, a sense of shame that she should be shamed, rises on your cheek, which makes Lili giggle and makes you blush more. The blush seeps inside, it becomes a positive warmth. ‘Scarlet, like a rose,’ says Lili, alluding to your cheeks and perhaps your hands do go to cover your face since her air of classroom banter increases your discomfort. You feel that this sensation welling inside you as you cover the tracks, manifesting itself in your cheeks in this glorious red, is one that deserves to be talked of in more than whispers. It should be discussed, you feel, with more elaborate manners than those of the diplomatic banquet your mother once brought you to. Or it should be shouted from high places, from the windows of trains, bringing roses to places you have never heard of. You cross from the tracks and climb up on the ramp and begin to tell Lili of your miniature man. But Lili tugs your palm, whispers that you should keep your voice down. A nun is passing, and the ramp is too narrow for three. You stand with your back to the sea to allow her walk by, tall, boxed and birdlike. You recognise the face beneath the bonnet, the greying hair. You call her name, though Lili’s hand goes out to stop you. And Sister Paul turns, her face changing from puzzlement to recognition to the quick smile that you remember so well, creasing the translucent skin. As she talks above the railway tracks in a voice hardly different from the one in which she introduced you to the age of reason you wonder what her name would be for this new age, the one Lili seems to hold between her lips now, like a mouthful of shamed peach. It is an age, you sense, containing truths so
immense that only a discipline like hers could do it justice. Behind you the tide seeps from the creases of sand.

  YOU CAME OF age on a day in July. It was a Monday and the beach was wholly deserted. One nun passed, whom you looked at closely, hoping to see Sister Paul’s smile. But it was a plumper face, buried under the folds of a different habit. The blocks of the ramp were so hot that you could hardly sit. You sat, though, and let their heat change into a private warmth. The tide was higher than you’d ever known it, halfway up the granite, obscuring the beach. You lay for hours in the swoon of that heat, your cheek touching the granite so that your eye travelled down from the tan of the stone, so hot that its surface seemed to dance, to the huge, perfect blue world of that sea. You knew something was happening, that time was longer than it should have been and you allowed those minutes to pass like hours, teasing every fragment of yourself out into the sensual glare of that surface. You imagined bubbles you had to burst repeatedly to find further bubbles inside them, you laid one cheek on the granite and then the other so that the sea seemed to leave its fixed position and globe above you, around you. There was a slight tremor in the granite and you sensed a train far off. You saw a tanker inching across the horizon and then the ground moved beneath you, every pore in the granite seeming to leap to your cheek and the train, going where, you wondered, came and was gone. You imagined the tide, higher than it ever should have been, flooding the ramp, water spilling over the granite on to the sleepers and tracks.

  23

  WOULD SHE ALWAYS connect orgasm with trains, the even sleepers stretching into the distance and the border of black rail, meeting somewhere beyond her vision where they melted in a dance of haze, or in perfect union, where the laws of perspective told her they could never meet, only appear to? Or with the train itself, the mysterious rumble in the turf causing twigs to leap, heralding the sight through the haze of distance of ‘the one friendly machine’? She called it that later, when she spent more hours on it than off it. But the convivial machine roars past and the child waves and never knows whether her wave is received by the unknown face in that strip of windows, whether the memory is carried towards a far-off station, a platform, a black footbridge. And the hope of roses always, for the pure-hearted waver. She would wave her hand years later, like the child who rarely sees trains. She would think of roses blooming from the window, sprouting from the axles. She would picture the landscape towards which the train always goes, always a foreign one, a garish plain where the tracks run over pliant peat, pass a disused canal and enter a clump of fir trees. The fir trees dip in gratitude. It is the landscape into which she has never been, towards which the train heads as it thunders past her, always beyond the farthest town, never on maps. She walks along the tracks looking for that carriage the dwarf told her of, which is small, like a childhood train. The tracks pass the canal that is now solid with frogspawn which falls over the sides of its banks, clinging to the fringe of pebbles by the track’s edge. It spawns even as she walks. It clings to her bare feet like the gossamer of snails and she runs lightly to avoid it, stepping from sleeper to sleeper, between the tracks. The wood of those sleepers has fallen soft with age and holds the print of each of her steps. The tracks are bright with their oxides, a glare of red she never thought rust could achieve, and they thread the crest of the bog, towards the fir trees. She is walking with her head down, following the tracks and yet not following, for each sleeper is an end in itself and with each step she takes she knows she has come. The function of tracks is to lead the train from one point to another and the tracks themselves she knows are neither arrival nor departure, just partaking a little of both. But the soft wood of the sleepers and the frogspawn always doubling itself tells her with every footfall that she is here. And seen from behind, she knows, her walk would always intimate arrival, a bundle of static moments somehow thrown through time. You are here, the tracks say to her, and she holds this message as she would a towel to her bare breasts, her head bent downwards, knowing that somewhere beyond her the tracks do indeed meet. She feels the slightest shift of her thoughts could destroy this and so she walks with a terror, a terror that she feels necessary to maintain her sense of joy. For through this landscape in which every point is the point of arrival and every step is the ultimate step, she cannot deny that she is walking and that these tracks do lead towards that clump of fir trees and pass through it, to beyond. The frogspawn leaps as if to celebrate her thoughts and rises in imitation of the fir trees until she is among them and a soft glove of pine needles covers the tracks. She is at the point, she sees, where the sides of the tracks meet, despite all the laws of perspective. And beyond where the tracks seam into one lies the train the little man told her of, glorious and aged. There is that bright red which rust could hardly manage. But it is rust, she sees as she draws nearer, a kind of passionate rust for the metal surface falls apart at her touch into puffs of the russet. And the rust seems there to highlight the forgotten roses. They spill from every crevice of the bodywork, from underneath the axle, from the cracks in the leather of the passenger seats. They are red and she is bathed in their shadow. She walks to the driver’s cabin, through the brambles.

  I HAVE PLACED the train with the roses by a disused canal and a clump of fir trees in the Bog of Allen, a flat open plane which is traversed by rail tracks, a wasteland between town and city. You tell it to Lili on the same ramp several days later. Your face flushes, but without a hint of coyness. You revere the physical details, moreover, the gleams of mica, the bumps of granite, the heat. Lili squirms and even now squirms before me in the telling, ‘Because I was a schoolgirl, yes, I may as well admit it, but there was more than that. I mean I feared for her. I sensed, you see, that my shyness was given to me, my bashfulness was learnt along with my history lessons and that was how it was, a bashfulness that, whether you like it or not, is safer and much more common than forthrightness. And if Rene hadn’t learnt it—not only that, she wouldn’t learn it, her reaction to every giggle of mine made me feel inconsequential, worse than a child, a retarded adult—what would happen to her when she had to confront the source of that bashfulness? If she was extraordinarily lucky, she would never have to confront it, but how many of us are that lucky? And I feared for her, you see, and that’s why I blushed—or that’s as much why I blushed as my shame was why, if you know what I mean. And I was right to fear and blush, I discovered, when she told me that extraordinary story about the dwarf. And then I was made conscious of the fact—as she was never—the fact that we were both thirteen. Only thirteen. And that in many ways I was older than her . . . would she ever pass thirteen . . . and so I blushed and feared for . . .’

  THEY EXCHANGE THESE confidences on the hottest days the beach has encountered, two girls, sitting on the lip of the ramp. Trains pass occasionally with the speed of a long, slow exhalation. The granite dances in the haze that makes the beach’s inhabitants seem removed, far-off, transfixed against the blue sky and the yellow sand. But both girls hardly notice them. They are inside the bubble of their own warmth, their own words. Lili is reminded of that day the class exchanged confessions, of the rows of desks, the irises. Rene is talking, using words that are too young and too old for her thirteen-year-old mouth. She has her legs drawn into her chin, her hands are clutching her calves, damp with perspiration. Her legs are plumpish, Lili swears. Three years later they will be on the back page of the Freeman’s Journal. They will have slimmed by then, be still fairly short, but give a definite impression of adulthood.

  ‘BUT THE YEARS passed like days on that ramp. And when we finally got up with our bums creased with all that granite, it was three years later. She was sixteen—’

  24

  WHILE LUKE VANCE and James stand waiting at Bray station, part of the line caves in on the way to Greystones. A wave that must have germinated far out rises like an open hand, clutches the tracks and drags them towards itself. The metal bends in the water and the sleepers scud through the foam, haloed by the spray. The Bray
train knows nothing of this but exhales a welcoming shroud of steam to them, father and son. Luke carries the tripod, James the case. They walk through the steam, through the door and take their seats on the seaward side.

  ‘SHE HAD A premonition, I suppose. The dark wings brushed off her, making her cloaks flap. You will be a professional, she told Rene, there is a photographer I know. I came with them. It will be your assignment, she told her, your money. I walked with them down O’Connell Street. Can you imagine that voluminous animal dying, being there one moment, gone the next? I can’t, even now. I had lived her through her stories, secondhand ever since I’d known them. But did she know, I often wonder, was that photograph a hint that she would someday live in Rene, Rene alone? An acquaintance stopped her on O’Connell Bridge. They talked for a while, they had that tone of voice, as when you talk of the Free State—’

  BUT WHAT IS it that delights Una as she walks towards the agency with both of them beside her? It comes to her in an unfathomable shift, a sudden, unheralded flood of happiness. She has grown heavier, but she now holds her weight like a flag, a proud flag of she knows not what nation, an imposing black cloak thrown round her shoulders fluttering with the sea breeze that meets them on the bridge. The salt brings a flush to her cheeks as it had when she walked towards that spa, past the fluttering canvas, sixteen years earlier. She knows now that she loves this street with its giant pots and its green litter bins and its aura of sea coursing through it, keeping all those flags that crowd the rooftops jerking as if they themselves remember the course of events that put them there. The only faces that turn as they walk are those surprised by the unlikely aspect of this trio and she accepts the stares with equanimity, knowing that at last they are directed not at herself but at the daughter to her left whom she guides through the afternoon crowds like a statue, a more perfect image of herself. The wide, lengthy street seems a unit to her, an image of temporal home, and homes, she knows, are for leaving. A man steps from the crowd to catch her attention and the wind flaps his fawn overcoat as it does her cloak. He talks to her like an intimate and she hardly bothers to recognise him. He talks of the state and the arms dumps. They will be there, he tells her, waiting to be resurrected should Dev take one step backwards. She remembers the old complicity, the common words and gestures, the nods of emphasis for certain names, of negation for others. He is reviving, he tells her, the Conradh classes in Parnell Square. He asks her to lend a hand. She nods, as he assumes she will, and she feels a hidden surge of delight at his mistaken assumption. She sees herself and her large cloak and the person she has always seemed facing him and another impulse makes her turn and continue her walk down that wide street thinking of everything that seems, of people in groups and nods of assent and flags jerking gracelessly from rooftops. She passes the General Post Office with its three females pointing heavenwards and the wide, wide street with its flapping banners stretches out before her as if the bricks had been laid, demolished and laid again, as if the bullet holes had scarred the angels’ feet just so that she could walk finally down it, closing her hand around her daughter’s elbow and lead her towards her first professional assignment.