New Town Soul

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘The changeling is bleeding heavily upstairs. He can’t live much longer. Is she alive?’

  ‘She’s unconscious. I don’t think it’s safe to move her.’

  ‘Then leave her here.’

  ‘I’m not leaving her. My shoulder is in so much pain that I can’t move anyway.’

  ‘You’re coming with me.’

  He grabbed my jacket in both hands, and dragged me along the stone floor with fierce determination. I kept screaming because every jolt was torture. He hauled me down a narrow passageway where the walls seemed to close in. It felt like a nightmare, but nobody could have slept through the pain in my shoulder. The old man dragged me into a cellar and then collapsed, panting heavily. Maybe we were all doomed, Shane bleeding to death upstairs and Geraldine having suffered a broken neck. I gazed towards the sprawled figure on the flagstones.

  ‘Don’t you die on me,’ I hissed, ‘Don’t you dare have a heart attack and leave me here.’

  He fumbled in his clothes for a box of matches. I saw an outline of the low-roofed cellar before the first match went out. He struck a second match, and managed to light the stump of a candle. He melted some wax onto a flagstone, then fixed the stump upright in the hot wax. The central flagstone was missing. A primeval instinct told me there was water there that I could drown in. I tried to rise, but could only crawl a few painful inches. We listened to footsteps stumble down the sloping passageway towards us.

  ‘Do you still have the knife?’ I whispered.

  The old man shook his head, as if the effort to speak was too much. Then the Shane I knew appeared, carrying Geraldine’s limp body. He sank to his knees, laying her gently on the floor.

  ‘Has anybody got something soft for her head?’ he asked.

  Geraldine’s clothes were covered in blood from the wound on the boy’s side. His stomach and jeans were soaked, and I knew that he must have left a trail of blood all the way from upstairs.

  ‘You need to get to a doctor,’ the old man whispered. ‘You’ve lost too much blood. I can feel the life draining from me too.’

  ‘It’s too late,’ the boy said. ‘You’re after killing us both, Shane.’

  ‘I don’t want to die, Thomas.’ The older figure’s voice grew faint. ‘I thought I did, but I’m too scared.’

  ‘I’ve faced death a dozen times,’ the boy said. ‘Each time, I swore to go through with it, but a drowning man will cling to anything to live on for even one extra second.’

  Both went quiet and I became aware of them looking at me. They seemed to possess a single mind, understanding each other’s thoughts.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, to whatever you are planning.’

  Both edged closer. I tried to sit up but the pain in my shoulder was too great. I went to kick out, but the younger figure had anticipated this. He threw himself across my knees to pin me down. The old man’s face pressed close to mine.

  ‘Make a wish for us,’ he coaxed. ‘Make any wish you want: wish for fame as a musician, for immortality. It will be granted.’

  ‘Go to hell.’

  ‘Hell?’ Both laughed bitterly, speaking simultaneously. ‘We are already trapped in hell. If you want to understand the meaning of hell, look around you, Joey.’

  ‘And you expect me to join you?’ I hissed. ‘You expect me to take my place in your line of trapped souls?’

  ‘What choice have you?’ they said. ‘We’re both going to die and you can barely move. Neither you nor Geraldine will find a way out. Nobody will think to look for you here. You will eventually die of thirst and starvation. But this does not have to be the end. The three of us can live on; we can all share your body. Just wish for something good. Geraldine is unconscious; her neck may be broken after that fall. Use your wish to get her safely away from here, because she is the one person that all three of us love.’

  As they spoke, they were dragging me across the flagstones until I lay face down, staring into the well. The younger figure had lost so much blood that the effort drained him. He collapsed beside me and I wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead. The older man reached for the two discoloured dice in the water. He closed his fist over them.

  ‘Are you really only sixteen inside that skin?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’m every age and no age,’ he whispered. ‘I’m dying and I’m scared. Give me your hand.’

  His ancient hand looked feeble, criss-crossed by lines that no palmist could decipher. But if he was telling the truth, there was a boy four months older than me trapped within that skin. I reached out my good hand to clasp his. His grip was suddenly vice-like, as if he had been saving every last ounce of strength for this moment. I did not realise that he still had the black-handled knife until he nicked my palm and then cut open his own wrist. Dropping the knife, he pressed the dice into my clenched fist and held it tight as our blood mingled.

  ‘No!’ I cried. ‘You won’t use me to live! Go down to hell!’

  The younger figure scrambled weakly towards us. At first I thought that he was trying to free my hand. Then I saw the same desperate determination in his eyes. He wanted to push the old man aside and take his place. His blood from the stab wound mingled with my blood. Both lay on top of me, trying to plunge down my fist that held the cursed dice into the water. The well looked only a few feet deep, yet I knew that it went down for ever. I knew that if I tumbled into it they would fall down after me and the stones would give way, and all three of us would plunge to our deaths. Their faces had a similar look.

  ‘Let go!’ they shrieked, ‘let go!’ I could not tell if they were addressing me or each other. Then the dice came loose from my grasp. I tried to hold on but I couldn’t. As the dice spun towards the water I heard them shout with one voice, ‘I want it back!’

  All three of us fell forward. As my head plunged into the water, I realised that there were faces waiting for me in the well. I could see the face of my father and both my grandmothers, alongside a host of other faces who meant nothing to me. But I meant something to them. They were my blood ancestors, summoned by my father; they were the protective faces who had pressed against the windows of that stolen car on Bull Island. They surrounded me as icy water filled my nostrils, their love seeming to hold me safe while that shout reverberated inside my brain: I want it back.

  I could still hear Shane and Thomas screaming those words, but another voice was drowning them out. It was my own voice, shouting the same fervent wish. I closed my eyes because my father was whispering not to look at the long procession of beseeching faces slowly being sucked out from the mouths of Shane and Thomas – each face inside a separate air bubble. These long-dead souls grabbed at my hair, clawed at my face, trying to cling onto me for life. Some had innocent faces and beseeching eyes; others had features contorted by evil. I could sense this chain of ghosts who had been living inside Shane’s body and Thomas’s body and Joseph’s body before that. But I also sensed another line of ghosts whom my father had summoned to form a shield of protective love around me. And even amid my terror, I knew that my father’s love was holding me tight and that he would not let go until all danger had passed.

  I placed my trust in him as I continued plunging down through the water. I had no idea how deep the well was or how many ghostly fingers kept trying to pull me in amongst the great whirlpool of the dead that surged around me, the Blackrock ghosts released through the mouths of Shane and Thomas. But I could sense them starting to fight amongst themselves. Some souls were struggling to break free and face the judgement or oblivion that lay ahead. Others continued to plead to me: Open your mouth and let us enter. We will live in your vein; we will pulse in your blood; we will teach you to live for ever.

  I knew I had to make a choice, that Shane and Thomas were offering me the chance to enter a limbo where I would never need to confront death. I could live on inside their chain of souls and be immortal. But if I refused to accept my own death, then how could I ever experience my life? I needed death to make sen
se of my life, to give it a beginning and an end. I didn’t wish to live forever, because that meant not to truly live at all. Allowing myself to drown in this well would be my last conscious act, and therefore, I chose to live it fully. With my eyes tightly closed, I yielded myself up to death.

  I felt Shane’s and Thomas’s fingers clawing at me one last time but the ghosts of my ancestors held me protected within their linked hands. My father’s voice spoke: I was weak and imperfect, son; no mortal soul is ever perfect. You cannot write the perfect song or live the perfect life. Don’t waste your life chasing immortality. Don’t live in anyone’s shadow. Just know that I love you. Live every day to the full during your single precious stab at life.

  Then the sensation of drowning stopped. It was replaced by a sense of hurtling backwards at speed, as if life was being rewound like the spools of some great master tape. Shane and Thomas were still screaming, but their voices kept drifting further away. I had no idea where they were going – heaven or hell or oblivion or limbo – and no idea of what I should expect when I opened my eyes. Then the speeded-up sensation of movement stopped and I knew that my father was about to speak for one last time. I knew also that somehow I had been granted my wish by his love, which had helped me not succumb to a chain of evil. I had got it back – the most precious gift: I had been granted back possession of my life.

  Epilogue

  Joey

  Ihad no notion of what lay ahead on the night that I accepted my death, the night I stopped falling through the freezing water, the night when that sense of hurtling backwards through time halted and my father’s voice whispered for one last time, It is now safe to open your eyes. His voice was distant, as if he had been watching over me for years but was finally ready to move on to wherever it is that the dead go. My eyelids became infused with such bright morning light that, for a moment, it hurt to open them. Instead I reached out blindly and felt my fingers touch the polished wood of a classroom door.

  I knew, then, where I was and what I had got back. I pushed open the door and entered a crowded classroom, crammed with faces that briefly turned to take in the new boy. Their glances were more dismissive than curious. There was no hostility in anyone’s eyes. I was too ordinary to be of interest. But a girl with jet-black hair looked up and smiled for one second before looking away.

  That smile was enough to give me strength, as it would often give me strength in the years to come. It would be some months before Geraldine grew relaxed enough to take my hand and open up her heart. On that evening – three months after my first day in Stradbrook College – she brought me to see the Sion Hill duplex where, two years previously, her friend for a summer had died from smoke inhalation, having been found cradled in the arms of his father who rushed back in to try and save him. Geraldine confessed how she once thought she had been in love with Shane O’Driscoll, but only realised what love felt like when she met me.

  That same evening, after passing the construction work going on where an old dairy used to stand on Castledawson Avenue, we walked on towards Booterstown to visit the tiny graveyard behind the Esso garage on the Merrion Road. A fresh tombstone there recorded how Thomas McCormack was finally united with his two brothers. Geraldine left flowers for the old man whom Shane and she had befriended during the summer when they played at being detectives – a man later found dead in the cellar of the house which he had left seventy years before to explore the world.

  It would take five years before I recorded my debut album, New Town Soul. This contained six original tracks by me and six songs by my father, discovered on a tape in a teacher’s attic. Was it a success? Was I famous? Reader, for the briefest time I was truly immortal, being played on every radio station. The problem with immortality, of course, is that it doesn’t last for ever. Since then, I have known the ups and downs of any musician’s life – heartbreak and joy, failure and unexpected successes. In short, I have enjoyed the miracle of a normal life, where I have tried to live every day as if it was uniquely precious and to appreciate this miracle about which I can tell nobody – the miracle of having wished for and having been given a second chance to live my life – a chance which I grasped on that morning when I glanced behind me in the classroom doorway to find that no other boy was standing at my shoulder. The chain of evil had been broken by the ghosts of my own ancestors whose love had formed a wall around me. But now those family ghosts were gone too. One day I may meet my father’s spirit again in some other realm, but for now I knew that I was truly on my own as I walked through the chattering students to claim the empty desk by the window.

  I wasn’t nervous, and I did not pretend to look busy. I did not think about Shane or Thomas or that house on Castledawson Avenue. They seemed like figments from a bad dream. I did not try to make sense of the past; I simply accepted this gift of a fresh start. The sun was warm against the windows. I had been unhappy in my previous school, but a whole new life stretched ahead for me. This time I knew that I could only live it once, so this time I determined to grasp its every last ray of happiness.

  Sitting quietly at the window desk, I waited for Geraldine to turn her head and smile.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  New Town Soul was written while I was engaged in a residency in Blackrock as part of the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council ‘Place & Identity Per Cent for Art Programme’. I would like to acknowledge the support of this programme and express my thanks to Ciara King, Carolyn Brown and the other staff of the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council Arts Office and the libraries and staff of the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council Library Service. I am also deeply grateful for the advice of Siobhán Parkinson and Elaina O’Neill of Little Island in Dublin, Derek Johns and Linda Shaughnessy of A P Watt in London and Beth Vesel in New York.

  New Town Soul is inspired by my imaginative interpretation of the experience of life in Blackrock. It very deliberately plays with facts and aspects of its history. No resemblance is intended to any person, living or dead. While the streets where this book is set are real, no such house exists on Castledawson Avenue. But this is the role of the creative writer, to merge the real and the unreal, to show not just what exists in a place but what could exist, to insist that every young reader and young writer has the right to establish their own alternative, parallel imaginative space.

  Dermot Bolger,

  March 2010