Back then same as now the sea-salty village of Doonbeg had the best amateur-drama group, that parish was all theatre, and they went there to see John B. Keane’s Sive, and afterwards my mother came out moved and upset. They went across the street into the graveyard and stood a time in the starless dark waiting for the sorrow to pass. She held her arms across herself and he wrapped his around her. They didn’t speak about the play. They didn’t talk out the upset the way they would if we moved the scene to America. My guess is that something in the play had caused her to think about having a daughter and that had led to thinking maybe it was true that they were not going to have children. When Mam gets upset she goes quiet. A whole battle goes on inside her, but unless you know her eyes you can’t tell.
Dad knew. It was his fault. That’s the default Swain position. The indelible watermark of failure. He wanted to apologise. But he wouldn’t know where to begin. He held on to her. They stayed in the quiet of the graveyard as the hall emptied and the audience went to Tubridy’s and Igoe’s, they stayed long enough so the seagulls that slept inland there on the grave of the two Dunne boys that drowned in the Blue Pool had become accustomed to them.
Then Dad said, ‘Come on.’ He led Mam back to the car. Even though he didn’t drive he was Keeper of the Keys, and this time he got in the driver’s seat.
Reader, you’ll think she said, ‘But you can’t drive.’
And he said, ‘I’ve been practising,’ or, ‘It doesn’t look too hard.’ Or any better dialogue you’d care to add here.
But I don’t think she said anything at all.
Then they were driving out of Doonbeg, Dad using that jerky pedal-down pedal-up technique he always had so the Cortina went down Church Street in spasms of hesitation, indicator flashing first left then right as he tried to find the windscreen wipers and at least see what they were going to crash into.
Maybe everybody got out of the way. I don’t know. I can’t drive. I can’t imagine how you do it. How you go around bends without knowing if there is going to be somebody standing there, if there mightn’t be someone who has fainted in the road like Mrs Phelan say, or that idiot boy of the Breegans who likes to stand in traffic. I can’t imagine how I’d progress at all, how I’d ever have the confidence to just trust that it would be all right, that the unexpected wouldn’t happen, because in fact that’s all that does happen.
Virgil had no such problem. He drove leaning forward, hands at ten and two hooked over the steering wheel, mouth tight, eyes fixed on the illumined way. He went faster than he realised. He was not like the Nolan brothers who took corners at a hundred, did the Olympic Rings in doughnuts on the Ennis Road and whose driving skills were mostly testament to a childhood devoted to Pac-Man, and who, Thank the Bust, Kathleen Ryan says, are sharing their talents with the people of Australia now. But he was a wild driver. It was as if he was determined to race her away from the place where the sadness was, as if the Cortina were chariot and horses both and something grave was in pursuit. He drove the way the blind might drive, by faith, ignoring white lines, hurtling away from the Atlantic and heading south by zigzag, sweeping aside veil after veil of mist until they came out on the familiar, the dark slick waters of the estuary. Virgil drove the car up on to the ditch. For a moment he must have thought that would do to stop it. He didn’t actually apply the brakes and the car bumped along aslant, two wheels up on the grass and Mam shouting ‘Virgil!’ And a louder ‘VIRGIL!’ (which certainly startled Publius Vergilius Maro in the Afterlife where I picture him in the sheet-toga Seamus Nolan wore when age eight he gave a sort of boxing interpretation to who he called Punches Pilot in Faha N.S. production of The Nativity. Publius though had probably managed to gather some young lads around him and was telling them about the Trojan War, again, and stalled mid-dactylic a little proud because somebody from Faha down in Earthworld was calling his name). They went jouncing along the bank, the car whipping bits of hedge, dipping in hollows, rising on crests before Dad thumped what he discovered were the brakes and Mam screamed, was jolted forward, and Pop! smacked her head off the windscreen the way the doll figures do in the Road Safety ads.
Only her head didn’t come off.
It was only a small pop probably. Because she just rubbed her forehead and blinked her eyes and Dad said, ‘Jesus, I’m sorry.’
There were ten blank seconds maybe.
You only need to wait five.
‘Mary?’
Mam looked across at him. She stared, wide-eyed. ‘Have we stopped?’ she asked.
She let him think he’d hurt her another ten seconds then she punched his arm. ‘You’re mad, you know that? Mad.’
‘Starting and stopping are the hard bits,’ Virgil said. And he smiled.
When my father smiled it was like he had unlocked the world. It was that huge. It made you want to smile too. It made you want to laugh and then it made you want to cry. It was in his eyes. I can’t explain it really. There was this sense of something rising deep in him, and of shine.
Mam put her hands to her mouth and into them she laughed.
‘Come on,’ he said. He was already getting out of the car. In the movie version Mam’ll say, ‘Where are you going?’ but the dialogue is edited out here. Here there is only his figure become white as he takes off his jacket and leaves it on the driver’s seat. He’s out in the mizzling night rain. His shirt gleams. Across the field the river is black and slick. ‘Come on.’
I know what the river is like at night. I know how it tongues the dark and swallows the rain and how it never ever sleeps. I know how it sings in its chains, how steadily it backstrokes into eternity, how if you stand beside it in the deeps of its throat it seems to be saying, saying, saying, only what you cannot tell.
‘Come on.’ He takes her hand.
And now they are running.
I know that field. Years ago I went there. It’s rough and wildly sloping, hoof-pocked and rushy-bearded both. Running down it is bump and splash, is ankle-twist treachery. You get going and you can’t stop. You’re heading for the river. And you can’t help but scream.
Mam screams. Virgil yells out. And they charge down the dark to the river. The bank is plashy from long river-licking. The muck is silvered and without footprints. It sucks on their shoes. Virgil stops and pulls off his. Then he’s taking off his shirt.
‘Virgil?’
Then he’s taking off his trousers.
‘You’re not?’
The rain is already beaded on his hair. He looks up into the sky. Then he smiles at Mam, turns, goes three steps and dives into the Shannon.
She yells out.
He’s gone. He’s disappeared into the river. She looks at the place where he went in but it’s moving, and quickly she loses the spot, tries to refind it but she can’t. She imagines where he must be gone, the line the dive would have taken him, and she traces that as far as she can but it’s lost in the seamless dark. ‘Virgil?’
Nothing.
A rush of questions, like swimmers entered a sea-race at the same moment, splash-stroke in her mind. How long can you hold your breath underwater? How far can you go? Does a current take you? Is the Shannon deep? Are there river weeds? Malignant river-creatures? Can he swim?
She looks out into the nothing. Then for no reason she can explain she turns and looks at his shoes on the bank. Empty shoes are the strangest thing. Look at a pair of anyone’s worn shoes. Look at the wear on them. Look at the scuffs and scratches. Look at the darkened heel-shine inside, where the weight of the world rubbed, the dent of the big toe, where the foot lifted. Tony Lynch who’s the son of Lynch’s Undertakers and who grew up a pallbearer says putting the shoes on the corpse is the hardest part. The empty shoes of someone who’s gone, there’s a metaphysical poem in there. You don’t believe me, look in Pablo Neruda’s poem ‘Tango del viudo’ in the thin white Selected Poems (Book 1,111, Jonathan Cape, London) with the bookmark Alberto Casares, libros antigos & modernos, suipacha 521, Buenos Aires inside. ‘Los mejor
es libros para los majors clientes’.
Empty shoes. Weird, I know. But true.
Mam looks down at Dad’s shoes on the bank, and that’s when suddenly it hits her: he’s gone.
Her heart flips over. He’s gone.
My father is gone from this world and in the next moments my mother experiences the kind of dread foreknowledge widows in Latin American novels do, where black birds are sitting in the tops of trees and the wind rustles like black crêpe and smells like charcoal. He’s gone. His story is over.
That’s it.
The immense loneliness of the world after love falls upon my mother. She stands there. She can’t speak, she can’t shout out. She’s just taking this ice-cold knowledge inside her.
Then, forty yards downriver, Virgil comes up through the surface. He yells.
It’s not a yell of panic or fear but of joy, and at that moment my mother discovers that my father is a wonderful swimmer. He’s learned in deep waters and distant places and not only has he no fear he makes fear seem illogical, as if water and current and tide are all graces and a man’s movement within them natural as it is on earth. His stroke is unhurried. There is a kind of elemental delight in crossing the pull of the river, in feeling it, allowing it, resisting. He swims like he could swim for ever. I think he could. I think he can.
He comes back to her and holds his place in the water at her feet. ‘Come in,’ he says.
‘I could kill you.’
It’s not the reply he was hoping for. When I get around to writing it, it will not feature in Chat-Up Lines for Girls who Don’t Get Out Much.
She’s serious, and not serious. Her heart has not yet flipped back and she’s in the deep waters of realising that if he was gone her life would be over, which in my book is basically substance essence and quintessence of Love.
‘I’m sorry.’
She looks at him. He is naked. His upper body has the strange luminosity of flesh when most vulnerable. It’s that pale tone the holy painters use, the one that makes you think what the sound of the word flesh does, that it’s this thin-thin covering, flesh, and so easily it can be pierced.
‘I can’t swim,’ Mam says.
‘I’ll teach you.’
‘You will not.’
‘It’s not hard. Mary, take off your clothes.’ He is floating below her, his arms doing a kind of backward circling I’ve seen him do so he’s moving but not going anywhere.
‘You’re mad.’
‘I’m not.’
‘It’s freezing. I’m freezing right here.’
‘You get used to it. It’s lovely. Come on.’
‘I’m not going in.’
‘Then I’ll have to come get you.’
‘Don’t you dare.’
He puts his feet down, finds the mud floor of the Shannon, which is like a dark paste, tacky and cold, and he wades in to the bank.
‘Virgil!’ She’s watching him, she’s warning him, but she’s not running away.
He puts his hands up, leans forward, and like a strange white river-thing coming ashore flips himself up on to the bank.
‘Virgil! Don’t.’
He stands, the river runs off him, leaves a river shine.
‘Come on. I’ll show you.’
‘Virgil!’
‘You’ll love it.’
‘Don’t you touch me!’
He takes a step towards her. And because she doesn’t want to run away and she doesn’t want to go in the river, and because the whole scene is unscripted and mad, she bends down and takes his shoes and fires them out across the dark and into the water. The surprise in his face makes her laugh. Then she grabs up the rest of his clothes.
‘Mary!’
She throws them, shirt and trousers making briefly an Invisible Man, briefly winged, until he lands on the face of the river. Clothes-man floats seaward. They watch. It seems he’ll swim to the Atlantic. Then a twist in the current takes them; soundlessly my father’s clothes slide under and are gone.
Virgil looks at my mother.
She looks at him.
Then she laughs, and he laughs, and then he comes after her and she runs but not so fast that he cannot catch her. And when he does, her hands feel the chill slippery skin of him and she smells the river that is on him and in him and his kiss is a shock of cold becoming warm, river becoming man.
Nine months later, Aeney and I swam downriver and were born.
Chapter 11
When I wake some parts of me are dead. My arms get under me during sleep. As if all night I have been doing backstroke, slow mill of arm over arm towards unseen destination until exhaustion arrives and I give up. I always wake with a feeling of things unfinished. I wake and feel these lumps under me and sort of wriggle to get them alive. Then the room and the house and the parish gradually assemble around me again and Mam looks in and says ‘Morning Ruth’ and lets up the blind on the skylight and opens it a crack so we can see and feel today’s rain.
Here, in what Shakespeare calls The Place Beneath, the rain that falls from heaven is not so gentle. If once, it’s definitely not twice blessed. Safe to say Dear William & his gartered stockings were never abroad in the County Clare.
‘How are you, pet?’ Mam sits on the edge of the bed. She pats and straightens and fixes the duvet and the pillows while she talks. She can’t help herself. My mam never ever stops. She’s just this amazing machine that somehow manages Nan and me and the house and keeps us all afloat. She’s on all decks, crewman, boilerman, purser, Captain. My mam is a miracle.
‘How are you feeling?’
I can’t say. That’s the thing. I can’t say how I am feeling because once I start to think what’s an honest answer to that? I lose my footing. There’s this huge dark tide and I feel O God and I can’t. I just can’t. I used to think that no one who hasn’t been inside your life can understand it. But then I read all of Emily Dickinson, the nearly eighteen hundred poems, and afterwards thought I had been inside her life in a way that I couldn’t if I had lived next door and known her. I’m pretty sure you could have sold tickets to see the look Emily gave if you asked, ‘How are you feeling today, Miss Dickinson?’
But I don’t want to be cold, or hurt Mam, and I don’t want to get into a discussion either, so I say, ‘I’m okay.’ And Mam smiles the smile that isn’t one, but has that patience and understanding and sadness in it, and from the pocket of her cardigan she takes the yellow and blue and white tablets and gives them to me. The water in the glass is room temperature, and on a single swallow the tablets vanish into me and taste like nothing, which, to anyone with even weak-grade imagination, is disconcerting. You want them to taste like something. You want them to be more substantial, and significant, in a way, though I cannot explain that.
‘Now,’ Mam says, ‘I’ll bring you up something in a little while.’
‘Okay.’
‘Okay.’
She doesn’t get up for a moment. For a moment there’s something silent sitting between us and I know it’s the untold story of our family and it’s like this sea-mist has come up the Shannon and into the room and hangs nebulous and opaque and tastes of salt. Then Mam pats my legs under the duvet two gentle pats and she rises and goes.
From the moment we arrived, Aeney and I were noteworthy personages in the drama of the parish. First of all, we nearly weren’t landed alive. Mother being Mother, she took the perfectly practical no-nonsense approach to pregnancy and paid no heed to the powdered ladies in Mina Prendergast’s who began their stories by saying I don’t like to say but or to those who cast their what Margaret Crowe calls Asparagus at the fact that Mam was older than the Faha norm for having a first baby, and in boyfriend terms Dad was An Ancient. The fact that Mam seemed so happy, which in Irish Catholic translates into Doom Imminent, was another portent. The whole parish was waiting for The Delivery. It was not that anyone wished us harm; it was just that people like to be right. They like Next Week’s Episode to turn out exactly as they expected and to sur
prise them. Nurse Dowling came and measured Mam and leaned over to listen to us and said hello. We said hello back. We were perfectly polite. Only we spoke at the same time so she didn’t hear that there were two of us. Everything is Grand, just Grand, and after that we stopped listening to the World to Come and swam the warm swimming that takes you back to being seaweed.
The plan was that we were to be born in hospital. Ennis though had been Downgraded. One morning a vicious sausage heartburn twisted the Minister sideways at his mahogany desk and he had a pregnancy epiphany, decided no one was to be born on the outer edges of the country. Any more, the excellent Irish people would be born in Centres of Excellence. There would be none of these in the County Clare. There would be one in Limerick though, which at that time was a Centre of Fairly Alright, but if you lived in Kilbaha or out on the Loop Head peninsula you’d have a hundred-mile drive on roads the Council had given up to the mercy of the Atlantic which rightly owned them and was in the process of taking them back. Still, the hospital in Limerick was the intended setting for our long-delayed arrival in the narrative, and in the blue Cortina Virgil practised delivery-driving. He didn’t want to fail this. He had a sense of enormity, as if for every inch swelling in Mam’s belly there was growing around his heart a feeling of immensity, as if his life had reached a verge and this great leap was about to happen, and he would be ready. He made the car spotless, or as near as, given that some spots were actual holes. He went on his knees and took every weed out of the garden. He got new gravel for the gravel way and raked it smooth, then raked it smoother. One day he cleaned the kitchen windows and the bedroom windows and then The Room ones, then the kitchen ones again, going round the house the way Tommy Devlin says a cow circles before calving. He whitewashed the house, limey spatters flecking the clean windows, flecking his hands, face and hair which he had no time to clean because Mam’s cry came and when he ran in the door she had already slid down on to the floor before the fire and Nan had stood her still-smoking cigarette on end, pushed the kettle across to boil and taken down two blankets and three towels so the flagstones would be softer landing and to New Arrivals this world wouldn’t seem penitential.
History of the Rain Page 22
