Skin Paper Stone

by Máire T. Robinson

  She stopped on the Salmon Weir Bridge and looked at the water below. The river was still swollen from the storm. She flung the papers up into the air and they scattered into the river, floating down the Corrib like lost love letters. She stood leaning on the bridge until they disappeared, a feeling of lightness embracing her.

  Suddenly, she felt hungry. It was a hunger deep within her like she had never felt before. The feeling reverberated through her entire body. If she didn’t eat something immediately she felt like she would collapse. She walked up Abbeygate Street and into Cooke’s restaurant. She had often passed it and looked in covetously but never gone in. It had an old-world charm with its candlelit tables and heavy velvet drapes, dark wood furniture and oil paintings. The first time she had seen it she had decided that she would go there when she graduated and received her doctorate. Well, that wouldn’t happen now, but she still felt like she had cause to celebrate. Something had shifted. It was the beginning of something. She didn’t quite know what, but it felt like a momentous occasion.

  She shook her head when the waiter brought her a menu. ‘Fillet steak, medium rare, and a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon.’

  He smiled at her. ‘There’s a woman who knows what she wants.’

  A woman who knows what she wants. Yes, why not?

  While she was waiting for her food, she took her notebook of to-do lists from her handbag. She struck a line through them all and flipped the pages until she reached a blank one and she began to write to make sense of her thoughts. She looked down at the words on the page.

  You want us to be one thing but we are all things. You do not know the why of us. You look for an entrance but we are the entrances. Hag, goddess, hag. Blink and we are one, then the other. A blink that lasts a century. The same picture through a different lens. The snake becomes the ladder. We are the HagGoddesses and the GoddessHags. We are everything and nothing.

  It was the truest thing she had written about the sheela-na-gigs. It had never occurred to her to write about them in this way before. She surrendered to the not knowing and it felt good.

  She picked up her fork and cut a piece of steak. As she ate she found herself thinking back over her research, of how people lived in those times. Heaven and hell were not concepts, they were real places. Life was important, but only as a gateway to the next life. Death was not the end, but a doorway to eternal life. Those beliefs were important back then because they were needed for society to function. What better way to stop people questioning their lot in life than making them believe that it was transitory, a test of hardship and suffering before they received their just rewards? I only have this moment, she thought to herself. This is it.

  There was a whole world out there. Stevie wanted to look at a different ocean, see a different shade of blue, feel the sun on her face. She wanted her ears to be filled with a language she couldn’t understand. Then she thought of Kav inviting her to go to Thailand with him. It had seemed ridiculous at the time, something to which she had not even given serious consideration. Now anything seemed possible. She would go with him. There were no confines, no limits, only the barriers she had created herself. Anything was possible now. It always had been, but she hadn’t seen it before.

  It was only outside in the daylight that she turned her phone back on and saw the missed calls and texts from Kavanagh. As she walked back towards her house she tried to ring him back, but there was no answer. She started to walk home, telling herself she would try him again later, but she couldn’t shake the feeling of foreboding that was creeping upon her that something was terribly wrong.

  Chapter 42

  Kavanagh awoke in Phuket as though awakening from a strange nightmare. In a state of shock, he could barely process the sequence of events that had brought him here.

  He remembered Alex handing him the sugary tea when he had called over to his house. ‘Here, drink this. It’ll help.’

  Kavanagh had accepted the cup and drank in silence. He was shivering in his wet clothes, his eyes wide, frantic, darting. He was trying to grasp what had happened, what it meant. His thoughts were frenzied and they flew away from him.

  Alex placed his hand on Kavanagh’s shoulder. ‘Did anyone see you? Kav, this is important.’

  Alex’s eye was swollen and he had stitches in his lip. ‘Your face. Jesus, your face,’ said Kavanagh.

  ‘I’m fine. Honestly, it looks worse than it is.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s not your fault.’

  ‘They were following me. They must have been.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘One of Pajo’s guys.’ He realised now that he was finally giving voice to this intuition, this feeling he’d been having for some time that had now taken shape as an absolute certainty. ‘I should have noticed. I should have stopped it.’

  ‘Kav, that’s not important now. I need you to focus and tell me, did anyone see you there when Pajo fell in?’

  ‘He just fell. I didn’t … I mean, I wanted to hurt him, I did, but not that. I wouldn’t …’.

  ‘No, of course not. It was an accident.’

  ‘They were in the van, Pajo’s guys. They were pulling up as it happened.’

  ‘Do you think they saw anything?’

  ‘It was dark … I don’t know. I can’t know for sure.’

  ‘If they saw you … I mean, if they know you were there …’.

  He couldn’t be certain. He had run from there in a blind panic. He tried to ring Stevie again but her phone was off so he had headed straight for Alex’s.

  ‘If they know you were there, they’ll come looking for you,’ said Alex.

  Kavanagh nodded.

  ‘I have some money. I don’t want you to argue with me. I want you to take it and I want you to get as far away from here as you can, as soon as you can.’

  ‘Okay,’ Kavanagh had whispered.

  And now he was here and she was there. He was here on his own and he had left her there. He had been desperate to hear her voice, but as soon as he did he found that he had no words to explain. He could hear the hurt in her voice, the confusion. How could you just leave like that? The distance between them was filled with static on the phone, her voice in his ear as she said Don’t call me again. Just don’t.

  He imagined that she was there with him. He conjured her in his room, stretched out on the hammock, her long limbs sprawled over its sides, foot dangling and tapping out a rhythm that only she could hear, a book in her hands. He saw the gentle encounters between Nogsy and Kannika and his heart ached: the way they shared a joke that only the two of them got, the way they could say so much to each other with only a look or a smile. It struck him how much of communication was not through words but a glance, a touch, a language in which only two people were fluent. He felt the absence of Stevie like a physical pain.

  Occasionally Kannika would look at him with such sympathy that he started to force himself to smile and laugh extra loud when he was around her.

  ‘What did you tell her?’ he asked Nogsy the night after he arrived when the two of them were out for a few beers.

  ‘She asked me why you were so sad. She said you’re different to how you were when you were here before for the wedding. I couldn’t explain it that well. Still working on my Thai. I said you’d had your heart broken and she kind of filled in the gaps herself.’

  ‘The universal language of the sad bastard.’ Kavanagh grimaced and drank some beer. ‘God, I must seem pathetic.’

  ‘She feels bad for you, that’s all. She asked me if something terrible had happened to you. If someone had died.’ Nogsy laughed.

  Kavanagh felt his blood run cold. ‘Really?’ He tried to laugh, but it came out sounding hollow.

  ‘Is everything … I mean, if there’s anything you want to talk about …?’ said Nogsy with great delic
acy.

  ‘Something happened in Galway before I left.’

  Nogsy leaned in closer, waiting for Kavanagh to continue, but he was silent, unable to meet Nogsy’s eye as he stared down at his hand on the table.

  ‘Want to talk about it?’

  For a moment Kavanagh thought about telling him. He knew he could trust Nogsy. To say it out loud might help him make sense of the confusion in his head, the circular repetition of his thoughts, the barely contained panic that floated up when he remembered that night.

  ‘Nah, nah I’m good. Thanks, Nogsy.’ If he refused to give voice to it, it would prevent it from being real. He decided the only solution was to get rip-roaringly pissed. He ordered a round of tequila shots, then another as the night swirled around him and he laughed and blustered and bantered with the bar staff.

  ‘You’re Irish?’ smiled the barman.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Kavanagh.

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘Galway.’

  ‘Ah, Galway!’

  ‘Have you been there?’

  ‘No, no, but I want to go.’

  ‘That’s what everyone says.’

  ‘We play song for you.’

  Kavanagh smiled and sat back down.

  Moments later the familiar tune wafted through the bar. And I lost my heart to a Galway girl. No escaping it, even on the other side of the world. He smiled to himself, raised his glass to the barman and nodded his thanks. One minute he was drinking his beer and the next he was heaving sobs, and he could feel the ground underneath him and feel Nogsy’s hand touching his back. ‘You okay, bro?’

  ‘It’s fucked up. It’s all fucked up.’

  He wanted to feel Stevie’s arms around him. He wanted to hear her voice telling him that it was okay, but that was impossible now. He’d blown it.

  Chapter 43

  Jacqui sat in Marguerite and Richard Donnellan’s sitting room, drinking tea and eyeing up the photographs that lined the mantelpiece of a young Pajo, or Patrick, as his parents called him. His mother had clutched Jacqui’s hand at the funeral. ‘Let us know how you’re getting on. Anything we can do to help, and you must come to visit …’.

  She hadn’t cried at the funeral. Walshy and Hulk had come over to her and they exchanged awkward hugs.

  Then Walshy had leaned towards her and whispered, ‘We think something happened to him that night down by the river.’

  ‘Of course something happened to him, Walshy. He fucking fell in.’

  ‘Did he fall though, Jacqui? Or was he pushed?’

  ‘He fell.’

  ‘You seem pretty certain about that. You and him weren’t getting along too well, were you?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Motive,’ said Hulk.

  ‘What is this – good cop, gobshite cop? Lads, this is hardly the time or place. Have you no respect?’

  They both looked bashful for a moment until Walshy piped up, ‘We’re gonna get to the bottom of this. It’s what he would have wanted.’

  She could see then how utterly lost they were without him. ‘You know what you should do?’ They leaned in closer. ‘Start thinking for yourselves.’ I’ve just started it recently. It’s fucking fantastic.’ And with that she turned on her heel and clip-clopped off.

  ‘So, your family must be excited about the baby,’ said Marguerite.

  ‘Well, they’re not really around. My mam died a few years back. Cancer. She was very young.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.’

  ‘And my dad was never really on the scene, so … I have a brother. He lives in Galway too. He’s … yeah, he’s around, you know. So that’s …’.

  ‘Patrick was an only child,’ said Marguerite. ‘We did everything for him. Maybe it wasn’t enough …’ .

  Jacqui reached out and held Marguerite’s hand. ‘It’s not your fault. There’s no rhyme or reason to this. Sometimes things just happen.’

  ‘We didn’t see much of Patrick these last few years,’ said Richard, shaking his head sadly. ‘Was he … did he seem … happy?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Jacqui. ‘I’m sure he meant to visit you more often. He spoke about you all the time.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘I’m so sorry that we didn’t know about you, about the baby. He never told us.’

  ‘I know. We were waiting until it was confirmed. He was planning a trip to visit you both to tell you the good news. And then, well, then the accident happened …’.

  She was surprised to find how easy it was to lie, to tell his parents what they wanted to hear by recasting Pajo as the loving boyfriend, the dutiful son. It wasn’t a difficult thing to do when she could see how happy it made them, how they clung to it. Sometimes there was a kindness to lies.

  *

  As Jacqui was getting ready to leave their house, gathering up her coat and bag and thanking them for their hospitality, Marguerite excused herself and said she’d be back in a moment. She returned with a bunch of sunflowers and handed them to Jacqui. She had admired them earlier in the back garden when they were showing her around their house.

  ‘Oh, I love sunflowers,’ she said. She was about to mention her tattoo but something stopped her. They might ask her if they could see it and then she would have to roll up her trouser leg, take off her shoe and roll down her sock. No, it was just for her now.

  ‘Anything you need, love, just let us know,’ said Marguerite as Jacqui turned to smile and wave goodbye as she headed down the driveway.

  ‘You’re family now,’ called Richard, his voice shaking.

  Chapter 44

  Once the jet lag had subsided, Kavanagh’s days took on a surreal quality. He had entered another world. Everything was different. He threw himself into his work, hoping it would distract him from the thoughts in his mind. In the tattoo parlour they were impressed with his work.

  ‘Holy shit, man, you’ve really improved,’ said Logan. ‘I mean you were good before, but now …’.

  With the hum of the needle, he disappeared. His mind was expansive. The gnawing feeling in his stomach almost retreated. He sent postcards to Finn, to Gary and Dan. A great job opportunity came up and I had to head over earlier than I’d planned. He hoped that they would be happy for him, that they wouldn’t question him too much, or read the lies between the lines – the false joviality that masked guilt and terror.

  He nearly broke down when he called his mother. ‘I’m sorry. I left without saying goodbye. I’m so sorry. How are you?’

  He heard her laugh. ‘Don’t worry, Joe, I’ve come to expect the unexpected from you. I’m back on my feet and feeling better than ever. You’ll never guess what I’ve done.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Only set up a painting group in town. I thought maybe one or two would be interested but we’ve sixteen members. We meet once a week and we’re planning a trip away to France next spring.’

  He wiped away tears with the back of his hand. ‘That’s brilliant.’

  It hadn’t rained since he’d arrived. It was disconcerting. Nogsy laughed when he mentioned this to him. ‘You won’t be saying that come September, believe me.’

  Kannika and Nogsy insisted on bringing him off on day trips when he wasn’t working. They travelled to Wat Chalong with the windows down in Kannika’s tiny yellow car.

  He walked around the temple in his bare feet, taking in the ornate gold leaf, the displays of Buddha statues, the reverential air of the place, the scent of incense that hung heavy in the air. ‘She’d love this. She really would.’

  ‘Stevie?’ said Nogsy.

  Kavanagh nodded.

  ‘Why don’t you try calling her again?’

  ‘It’s no good, she’s not speaking to me.’


  *

  ‘What other historical sites are here?’ he asked Nogsy when they were back at the house later.

  ‘Jesus, bro. There’s tons.’ He showed Kavanagh some photos of the places that he and Kannika had visited. He marvelled at the temples and laughed at the photos from the fertility shrine in Bangkok with Nogsy embracing a giant penis statue.

  ‘It’s funny. I was never that interested in any of this stuff before.’ He found himself charting itineraries, trips that he would take if Stevie were with him.

  ‘There must be a way,’ said Nogsy. ‘A way for you to make it right.’

  ‘Maybe there is.’

  He called Alex on Skype. His bruises had faded and he looked much better than the last time he had seen him.

  ‘You look great, man.’

  ‘So do you. You got some colour.’

  ‘Any news about …’. Kavanagh couldn’t bring himself to say his name.

  ‘Our mutual friend?’

  Kavanagh nodded.

  ‘There was an obituary in the paper. I can send it on to you.’

  ‘Oh God, no. No. I mean, that’s okay. What about our mutual friend’s mutual friends?’

  ‘Those guys? Yeah, they were looking for you. I called over to your place like you asked. Gary and Dan were asking me about it. I didn’t let on I knew anything about it.’

  ‘And did you find it? Was it still there?’

  ‘Yeah, I have it here. I’ll make sure she gets it.’

  ‘Okay, thanks. How’s everything with you? How’s … the shrubbery?’

  Alex laughed. ‘This is great. I feel like we’re in a spy film.’