The Woman's Daughter

by Dermot Bolger

  PART THREE

  The Crystal Rivulet

  I can still sense it here, Johnny, feel it in my blood as it flows beneath this roadway. Thirty years since last June the stream has been buried – I remember coming up from my cottage that morning to watch the workmen smoothing over the tarmacadam with the children from the new houses gathered in a crowd – but I can sense it now swirling down the bank through the underground pipe, past the roots of the fir trees in your granny’s garden and slopping underneath the very foundations of the room you sleep in.

  It’s my secret, this twisting water path hidden under all these houses and roads, there are few left alive who could follow it still. But every night I walk its length, naming the runs and trout pools that have vanished, recording the name of each for nobody. And one day soon you will know it too, you’ll feel its pull beneath your feet like a diviner, stumble through every night-lit street again and again waiting for the moment of certainty when you will know you are standing above the exact spot, until you can trace its route at night in the darkness of your mind.

  I could walk for miles each night once. It’s all a single man can do when his mind lays siege to him. The vital thing now is not to fall – death I can tolerate, it is to be crippled which terrifies me. The joints stiffen in this autumn weather, I have to rest to catch my breath after every twenty strides, but I can see my destination now after all these empty years. I’ve not much longer to walk, a few more miles and my task is done. Every day for these past few months I’ve thought, why you of all of them? And every night I’ve stood here in the shadows of your house, like a young man courting a shy bride, desperate for a glimpse of an arm, a bare shoulder, anything before your light is switched off.

  I’m pressed against the wall of this laneway where the shadows hide me from the road. I know how dangerous it is, the eve of Hallowe’en, every scrap of waste ground and every derelict house looted for timber. I can hear the gangs passing, the clank of bottles and their heavy laughter, but it’s all that’s left to me now, your framed square of curtained light floating like some night sailor in the blackness of the wall. I long for these moments, even more than your chance visits in the afternoon, they keep me warm as though just by gazing up towards your room I am sharing an intimacy with you. I spend the days not daring to count the time until I can begin this walk and when your light goes out I am dead and trapped already in the deaf suffocation of the earth.

  Only the headlights of the huge trucks can catch me here, their rickety beams bumping and shifting over the road’s uneven surface. They stumble on to me for just an instant, ancient battered hat, long black overcoat and hawthorn stick, with my dark face screwed up to stare back at them sweeping on towards the traffic lights. From Meath and Monaghan they come, sealed containers of machinery and heaped carcasses still saturated with blood, as they head towards the docks. I can see them coming in my mind, swaying across the night over the flat road I often travelled to be hired out as a boy, through Slane and Ashbourne, the white mist gathering in the fields like a foretaste of dawn as they trundle onwards towards the first street lights on the edge of the city, the sudden wavecrest of houses and my old face perpetually caught against the wall.

  Some drivers raise their hands from the wheel, they’ve become like friends now, messengers from outside, their wheels trembling as they wait for the lights to change. I shuffle forward awkwardly on my stick as though trying to communicate with them: wait for me, I too want to change, to pass on, to die, to break from the purgatory of this place. The green light floods on, they surge forward and I am left behind.

  Ever since the morning when his grandmother led him up the overgrown path and into the oppressive stillness of the house where the woman and her daughter lived, the same nightmare had become his constant nocturnal companion. It haunted Johnny Whelan so much that he would lie awake for hours after he went to bed with the light on in his room and his heart pounding as he tried to still the buzzing in his head and focus his thoughts on what was happening to him. He had to fight it, stay calm, tell nobody. The red tablets were piled up in their jar by the bed like the moons of Mars that had crashed from their orbit. Eventually he would swallow the last one and force himself to switch off the light and allow sleep to take possession of him.

  Then the dream would return in which he was still awake and lying in an unnaturally pitched blackness which obliterated all the familiar landmarks of the room. Was he at home in his parents’ house, the childhood bedroom that was his no longer? He shook off the sensation, he knew where he was, the room he had slept in every night since his father’s death, the room in which his own mother had lain awake after dates as a single girl. Gradually from his left a tiny column of light began to glimmer through the curtains and he was able to distinguish the shape of the room again. He stared in fascination at the faint reflection of light, like phosphorescence, like a luminous statue from Lourdes, which shone from the far side of the glass. The curtains seemed about to separate by themselves and yet never moved, like Christ’s eyes in a religious painting if you stared closely at them. The light terrified him and yet he was drawn towards it. There was no sound in the house, as though his room had become detached from the lives around him. If he shouted he knew nobody would hear and when he tried he found that his throat was so dry no sound would come from it.

  There was just him and the light shining dull and patient through the glass, ebbing and quivering like a flame. He wanted to stay away from it but his mind seemed to have lost control over his limbs. His bare feet slid from the sheets on to the cool lino and he stood gazing at the illuminated pattern on the curtain. He felt his hair stiffen and his legs tremble as he moved towards the window. Somehow it seemed as if his future waited there, embedded in that flame weaving in the shape of a figure through the cloth, that the explanation of these last few months burned within that light, but if he chose to pull the curtain aside he could never return to the safety of the world he had known.

  What does it want of me? he repeated in his mind, what does it want? He gazed in horror at his right hand which crept towards the curtain and just when his fingers began to close over the knotted cord he was caught, lifted up and flung weightlessly into the air. He hung swaying between the floor and ceiling in an enveloping flush of heat from the light which ignited to fill the entire window and then retreated away from the house. And always at this stage he remembered that it was a dream, the same dream, and he would be both relieved and furious with himself for being fooled by it again. He would wake with that strange warmth draining from his limbs to lie in the dark bedroom, knowing that he was too old at sixteen to cry out or to be scared, afraid to give them any ammunition for their injections and red tablets.

  And as he lay there struggling to be calm, he would always remember the slow walk with his grandmother up the path to the woman’s house, sparkling with slivers of glass, and into the dank hallway, the cluster of hushed women unsure of what to do next, and how, when they opened the living-room door to stare at the smears of blood and smashed ornaments, he had walked by himself up the stairs, feeling the wood creak beneath him, and turned his head at the top as though drawn by compulsion to look in through the open bedroom door. How long had he sat on the top step, not needing to go any further, waiting for his grandmother to discover him, for the women to come and stare through the open bedroom door where the single shaft of light lit the fading colours of the lino? The moment was frozen in his mind as if his life before that had just been a preparation for the instant when, gazing down at the dusty yellow sunlight entering the hallway, he had imagined from behind him a sudden sharp pain like a child’s bony fingers pinching his back. And then slowly he had turned his head.

  I was named after a lake that wells up during the winter rains to disappear in springtime again. Turlough, my father said, the only word of Gaelic he knew. This was his favourite street, leading down through hawthorn bushes across the small bridge to the Jolly Toper.

  They’ve torn
it apart now, the carriageway has sliced open its soul. This clanging metal bridge links the two halves, the noise of my boots and stick telegraphed through the steel to echo down at the far end. The top of the trucks almost touch my feet, the bridge trembling in their slipstream. The view from up here is like I remember as a child before the estates cut off the sweep of hills down to the city. Ten minutes it often takes me to crawl across its back. I feel like I’m crossing the hunched skeleton of some metallic dinosaur, the ghost of a future age who came this far and withered in the dead world of what was once my home.

  Those cottages down below, where I often sat watching the carts creak in from the countryside. The Ferret Casey tuning his fiddle while his wife fetched the oil lamp down. The roofs are gone from them now, a single rafter standing like a naked bone. The children have torn the corrugated iron from the windows to climb inside. You can see the glint of smashed bottles there, the blackened stains in a corner where somebody lit a fire and still a small square of wallpaper hanging on one wall like an epithet. Any last timbers have been torn away since yesterday, are loaded now on unlit bonfires beneath the night sky. I’ve watched them sink this far, pitying their dilapidation, but now they will survive to see me buried.

  Past the pub with the overgrown lane and around by the trees. I’ll halt by the old Protestant church to get my breath back. That rasping hurts my throat, each night it grows harder to walk but I’ll finish my rounds again, I’ll keep faith with the past. The church is rarely used now with so few Protestants left, not like when the Archbishop and Lord Chancellor had their big houses here. They’ve placed wire mesh over the stained glass. It must break up the moonlight straining down the aisle inside, stretching from the gold dais wrought into the shape of an eagle in flight, past the empty pews to the cupped stone of the baptism font.

  Often when I listen out here I catch the splash of water there, no cry, no name, just the pouring of water over a skull which is gone. The moonlight never touches the side walls, the elaborate stone carvings carried from the ruined church to those fallen asleep or taken into the Lord’s care, their titles and virtues etched into the white stone. And beside the altar, the most simple plaque: Elizabeth Morris, National Teacher in this parish, 1890–1933. I remember her hunched figure at the top of the classroom, staring through spectacles at the children of the children she once taught. And a bright sweet proffered to the barefoot Catholic boy that was me, standing there, after running from Shallon House with a note for the child of one of the big farmers nearby.

  I’ve never known whose feet they are, but each night I hear them, the right leg dragging a little as the footsteps pace down the aisle, one of the hundreds of journeys never completed through the village. That exhausted horse straining up the hill on the Main Street, her caked mane and face flecked with muck and sweat as she presses towards the trough she will never reach on the fair-green outside the pub; the fair-haired child with consumption coughing for eternity in the top bedroom of the house on the corner; the dwarf almost hidden by the parapet of the stone bridge that has vanished; the contorted face of the lunatic racing through the garden of Farnham where foreign nuns now walk in the convent; the foot soldier, speared by a sharpened stick when the siege was broken, still twisting towards death on the shoulder of the new carriageway; the youth’s hand on fire when they melted the lead from the roof of the great house to make bullets; the terrified woman peering from the deep-set window of a vanished cottage in the floodlit supermarket car-park, keeping a vigil for her husband’s return. These ones I feel I can see, but there are other more indistinct, ancient shapes without even the memory of features now.

  The list is so long I find it hard to remember each one. All the way from the dying square of light in Johnny’s window to the bedroom of the cabin where I was born, I try to think of each of them, like an old woman in church with her litany of saints’ names. I shamble down these alien streets, named after patriots and flowering trees. My legs ache with the strain but I remember them still. This was my home once; I knew the eye in the knot of every tree, the moss sheltering in the stones of each laneway. It’s yours now, Johnny, I’m lost in its expanse, its metal bridge and concrete paths, the steel shutters over supermarkets and shops. I’m ready to join that list of ghosts, I’m part of them already. An old man on the stone outside his cottage longing for someone to stop and talk, a lone figure on a stick at night following a twisting path.

  When I am dead, Johnny, just remember me. At the end of my life all I ever cared for was the sound of your voice on the path down from the road, the slight chance you might call, half mockingly, to drive out the loneliness of those small rooms with their incessant voices. And that after the pain and enveloping darkness I might at least live on in some obscure corner of your memory.

  People treated you different when your parents were gone. He could feel the teachers in school watching him, over friendly at times or careful with their words. Only the French teacher was unchanged. ‘I was talking to your mother last night. She is very displeased with your progress,’ he would roar at Johnny as he roared at every other boy in the class, peering down at them, not even aware of their names.

  What state was her body in? He didn’t want to think of it, but sometimes the thought caught him unawares. He’d blink and try to keep his eyes open, terrified of the images that would be lurking if he closed them.

  Dusty evenings passed in his grandmother’s house, the leather bag on top of the wardrobe which she had carried in and out of every house on those streets. A neighbour who is a nurse can always be called upon by those too timid or poor to trouble a doctor. The birth of children and their death, fathers wasted with cancer, old women with hypothermia like shop dummies stacked on the floor after a sale. How much tragedy had that leather bag witnessed? His grandmother had only cried once as her daughter was lowered, then wiped her tears, retired to her bedroom where the oak death cross she had placed in her daughter’s hands was hung back above the bed. The same cross her own mother and grandmother had gripped in their final moments of life, the cross her own fingers would clasp when the nurses moved with hushed voices around her.

  His mother had died that autumn, leaves deadening the noise of the wheels as the hearse slowed for a moment outside the home that had once been his own. And peering through the car window, past the cluster of schoolfriends and neighbours, he had seen Turlough, old black hat and stick, staring at him unnoticed at the corner of the street.

  Christmas passed and the giddy shock of grief. There was just a quiet ache, surprising him at times like a phantom pain. In February he stood in the early spring sunlight beneath the bare line of old trees in his school and gazed at the old monastery where the monks lived. There were so few of them left now, figures slight as cobwebs staring from the windows at the boys playing soccer outside. The monastery had been a fever hospital once, patients wheeled out to sit convalescing under those very trees, staring across fields where the housing estates stretched out now. Old Turlough might remember it, he thought, though nobody else really living now.

  The last few drops of rainwater trickled down the bark and dripped around him. He thought again of Joanie, sitting at her desk in the convent a dozen streets away. It was only a month since he had met her at a dance in the Grove. All evening he’d wandered nervous and self-conscious through the swirling bodies under the lights, lingering beside the bank of coats trying to find the courage to ask somebody. His throat was dry as again and again he walked towards some girl only to move on at the final moment, cursing himself.

  And then in the final fast set when almost everybody was on the floor, their movements distorted by the strobe lights, Joanie had just appeared beside him and it was all suddenly easy. She nodded and began to dance before he had even finished the sentence and her smile relaxed him so much that he placed his arms around her waist when the slow set came on. She wore jeans and a blue woollen sweater and he had never touched anything as soft as her back through the material when they moved w
ith her head tucked between his chin and shoulder. They walked out into the night past the cluster of youths at the gate.

  ‘I’ve no money for a taxi,’ he said, embarrassed.

  ‘It would be nicer to walk,’ she replied.

  They paused at the old wall on the corner of her street beneath an overgrown hedge that shaded them. The road fell down below them towards the traffic lights on the carriageway. In the factory on the far hill a steel crane gleamed in the spotlights through the gate. Ivy had begun to flower on the wall behind them, other footsteps passing without a glance.

  ‘Where do you live?’ she asked.

  ‘With my granny. My parents are dead.’

  ‘That’s strange,’ she said. ‘So do I. So are mine.’

  Faking an experienced air he bent his head towards hers. Her lips opened and he tasted lipstick and then the slippery warmth of her tongue. He raised his hands to her hips and hesitated, his inexperience found out, until she reached down to draw them up between her blouse and jumper. Through the cloth he could feel the outline of bra and the heat of her breasts which his hands pressed clumsily. It had been raining early on and the leaves above his head were cool and wet. There was the heavy scent of damp trees and moist earth from the gardens and when he closed his eyes she seemed to taste to him of lilac.