Hand in the Fire

by Hugo Hamilton

  News of her disappearance from Furbo would most probably have reached the island by then, so perhaps her identity was already known to them as the young woman who had been denounced by the church. The men on the island would have had no option but to go to their own priest for guidance in the matter. The priest in charge of the islands would have known that this was the woman who had brought scandal to the coast of Connemara. And because she was with child and unmarried, she could not be given a place of burial in consecrated ground.

  He had never been out to the islands himself and didn’t know where she was buried. There were some stories going around that she was brought to the edge of the cemetery and buried outside the walls, unrecognised by the church. There were stories that she lay in that spot outside the walls for many years until the cemetery was enlarged. The perimeter walls were extended and she may have found her way back in after a long time alone, slipping inside quietly, included at last.

  ‘It’s just a rumour, I think,’ he said. ‘I’m not so sure that’s true. It’s impossible to verify, in any case, because there would have been no headstone erected with her name on it.’

  He said people may have got her story mixed up with somebody else, because it was not uncommon for people to be excluded back then, even unborn babies which were not baptised, buried alone in unmarked graveyards by the sea. There was an English sailor washed up on a different island, on Clare Island, during the Second World War. A man whose body was buried outside the Catholic graveyard and given a headstone but then became included later when they steered the stone wall around his grave. He had even heard of a graveyard in Belfast where there was a wall built underground to keep the dead apart.

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Máire,’ he said. ‘Máire Concannon.’

  ‘Was she drowned or did she do it herself?’

  He looked away, unable to answer that question. He appeared not to be in the same room any longer.

  There were a million phrases for letting people know that you were leaving. It was the hardest thing of all to learn, getting up and saying that you were on your way. I coughed a bit and stood up and said it was time to go, but he didn’t hear that. Trains could have come and gone through the room without him noticing. Then finally he looked at me.

  ‘You’re going,’ he said.

  I gave him my number. I told him that if there was anything I could help him with, he could call me any time. I suppose I was trying to stop him from disappearing again. I fumbled with gestures and made all kinds of promises which nobody would have expected me to carry out.

  His handshake was very firm, lasting a long time. It seemed to ask me why I was leaving so soon and would I not stay and go for a drink with him. It was asking me to believe him, to trust him, to speak well of him. A handshake often verses. The longest handshake that I can remember, holding on for well over half a minute, maybe a full minute, maybe even a lot longer, turning me into a child in his presence. I didn’t pull away. His hand contained the entire journey of his life, on ships and trains, through airports and cities and bars, all the places that he had worked in. All the names of people he met. All the stories and memories, the laughs and triumphs and failures and injustices. A handshake full of things that I still wanted to know but had not thought of asking at the time. A handshake that remained imprinted on my hand long after I had walked back down the street. Days later. Weeks later. I still felt the strong grip of his hand around mine as though he would never let go.

  22

  I suppose this was the real trespassing. Going against all the rules of friendship and privacy and confidentiality.

  I told Rita that I had to go back to Belgrade for a funeral. I said I had managed to get a cheap flight and would be back before she knew it. The work was suspended to some degree, in any case. I was still waiting for Darius to deliver the frame for the casement window, I made sure to explain, so it was a very good time for a funeral.

  ‘You’ll have the house to yourself for a few days,’ I said, which was not a particularly good thing to say.

  The same story went out to Kevin. It was all a complete lie, of course. I had no intention of going to a funeral back in my country. I was starting to get the hang of making things up and going on detours with my words.

  ‘You’re not doing a runner now, are you?’ she said, looking at me as though I was one of her pupils in class.

  ‘No way.’

  ‘I’ve heard that some people are just dropping everything and going home.’

  ‘I swear to God, not me,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t let you down like that, Mrs Rita.’

  I gave her the exact time that I would be back. I had even learned off a bogus travel itinerary, with return flight times, in case they asked. She was waiting for me to confess what I was really up to. But I kept my nerve and didn’t reveal a thing, not even the fact that I had met her husband and that he was asking about her and that he still had the picture of their wedding day on the wall of his basement apartment, not far from here.

  ‘Don’t forget to bring me back a tin toy,’ she said.

  My way of looking at this was not so much that I was breaking the rules of privacy but still trying to get the family back together, in my own way.

  On the bus to Galway I felt I was being watched and that everyone knew what I was up to. I must have had the look of urgency in my eyes, needing to find out things.

  I got to Furbo early in the afternoon. Na Forbacha it’s called in Irish, a wild rocky coastline with lots of stone walls and crooked fields and some cottages still in existence. You can see how the people tried to make the best of it by compiling as many rocks as possible on to the walls so there would be some space on the land for things to grow and feed a cow. There was little to sustain the people back in the old days apart from their language and their stories, living on a strip of rock between the bog and the sea. I saw some of the small fishing boats they called Currachs. Black canvas rowing boats with pointed oars that were no longer in use very much because they were as light as a paper boat on the water and were the cause of too many fishermen being lost by drowning.

  Riding to the sea, they called it.

  The place must have changed quite a bit in recent times. There is a big hotel situated right on the shore now which seems to have come from a different country and been dropped on the landscape, looking more like an institution with the usual three flags flapping in the forecourt and a thousand bedrooms and a piano that plays by itself in the dining room. There are some wooden shelters erected on the shore for the guests to sit and look out across the Atlantic towards the islands. It’s no wonder they would build a hotel here in this place, because the guests got the spectacular view all to themselves.

  What was the view worth in times of hardship? you had to ask yourself. Because I was from somewhere else, I had the ability to censor the big hotel from the map. The only thing that didn’t change was the sea and the waves still pounding with the same rhythm after all this time. I thought of how things must have been here when life was still in the hands of luck and faith and when there was no such thing as jam and peanut butter and biscuits in the shops, when the people here must have been subjugated by forms of power that was not unlike the way things were in my own country.

  What would it have been like for a young woman to become pregnant? An unmarried mother, denounced as unfit to live among her own people. She had become a stranger overnight. Her residence permit had run out, you might say. Faced with deportation, only in her case she was forced out into the sea. She had lost her rights and had become an alien in a place where she had grown up thinking of as home.

  Looking out across the bay, the Aran Islands appeared to me like whales with grey rounded backs coming up out of the water. I was probably not the first person to think of this, but it felt to me like an original way of describing them because it was my first time seeing them. Whatever way the light falls, they keep moving a little, dipping and coming up again. They say the distances
before you in these parts can hurt your eyes, and that’s true. The islands are an illusion, out of reach. The coastline at my feet was real, with a gentle slope down to the shore. I could see how easy it was to get carried away across to the islands by the tides. I found lots of places along the shore where you could easily walk out into the tide in desperation and disappear.

  I walked along the beach at Furbo and thought of myself shore-ranging, looking at items washed in on the tide. Bits of saturated wood. Logs. Bottles. Plastic containers full of sand. A trainer filled with a sand foot. Submerged trousers. Shells. Seaweed. A gull feather. The skeleton of a sheep, with some wool still attached. Bits of fishing gear. Blue and green nets, half buried. A crushed lobster pot. Rusted metals. Buckets. Bins. Bicycle wheels. A car tyre. The remains of a suitcase. A Spanish milk carton and a red interdental brush, items that were probably tossed overboard by fishermen or by sailors on those enormous cargo ships. All the bits and pieces that are returned eventually by the force of the waves.

  I was sorry I had not asked Johnny Concannon more questions, such as where he had lived and was his house still standing?

  There was little that could be verified about the drowned woman. No police report. No inquest. No eye-witness evidence. No death certificate, most likely, under the circumstance. Only her name, which would have been known locally as Máire Conceannain, though probably registered in the parish records as Mary Concannon.

  I walked up to the church in Furbo and knocked on the glass porch of the small parochial residence. An old priest came out with his collar undone. He brought me inside, into a small office off the hallway. It was hard for me to explain what I was looking for, a foreign national asking about a young pregnant woman who was ordered by his predecessor to go and drown herself.

  ‘I’m only a visiting priest myself,’ he said.

  He explained that he was standing in while the parish priest was on holidays. He was not from the area, so he had not heard of any pregnant woman being drowned. He didn’t seem to think there was anything unusual about a person with my accent investigating these matters. He also explained to me that there was no church in existence in Furbo until quite recently.

  The nearest church at the time of Máire Concannon’s life would have been in Barna. That was some kilometres away, but still accessible on foot. On occasion, the priest from Barna would have come to say Mass in the school in Furbo on feast days, perhaps, for the old people mostly who could not make the journey. But that would have been quite rare and most of them would have walked it into Barna and back on Sunday mornings, unless they had a bicycle or a cart pulled by a donkey or a pony and trap, which was also an exception. He could remember when only the odd priest and the doctor owned a car around Connemara.

  If I was looking for the parish records, he added, then I would have to go back into Rahoon in Galway. All births and deaths and marriages would have been entered into the records at Rahoon, which had by now become part of Galway city.

  I walked as far as Barna because I wanted to know how long the trip would have taken for a woman carrying a child. The church in Barna was new. The old one had been knocked down and rebuilt. Inside, I spoke to a woman who had not heard of any drowned woman either, but who was able to show me a photograph of the old church in the parish magazine on sale in the porch. It was a stark kind of building with high windows and a square bell tower, one of many around the country, so I believe. The woman even pointed at the small, overgrown ruin of an earlier church on the far side of the road, a further century back. The modern church seemed out of context with the landscape and the events which had taken place there. It was hard for me to get any idea of what it might have been like to hear the words of the priest denouncing a pregnant girl from the pulpit. But as I came out of the church, I felt the cutting wind coming in from the sea where she had been told to drown herself.

  Most of the town in Barna was like a new shopping centre. It could have been any suburb in a city, except that you couldn’t avoid being reminded that this was Connemara by the landscape and by the sight of the blue sea by your side at all times. Also, the people. You could never forget where you were when you talked to the people in the shops, because they wanted to know where you were from and what brought you here, hoping that you might get into a conversation when you only asked for a bottle of plain water.

  I walked down as far as the small fishing harbour. There was a row of houses along the way, one of them with white lichen spots all over the façade and the last one ending the terrace had become a fish restaurant. Some lobster pots were stacked up on the pier and I saw a few of the old black canvas boats lying upside down like the shells of giant mussels which had come from the bottom of the sea.

  The church at Rahoon in Galway was more like a cathedral. You got the impression that the congregation was enormous at one point and how it grew so big that the parish was divided up into more and more sections with new churches being built in small places like Furbo and beyond, but which now had very little followers left apart from the old people.

  Right beside the church at Rahoon is the Presentation Convent where the parish records are kept. I went up to the door of the convent, which was streak-painted in brown, like many doors belonging to religious orders in Ireland, a particular coating of paint that sends the shivers down some people’s spines whenever they pass by, so I’m told. I met with a nun by the name of Sister Consuelo. She seemed to think there was something odd about me and asked me if I had sought permission from the parish priest to investigate the records. I told her I hadn’t. I gave the name of Johnny Concannon and said he was unable to make the journey from Dublin himself and asked me to step in and enquire about the records on his behalf as a favour.

  She told me that I could not consult the records personally. She asked for my name and when she repeated it in her accent, it sounded more like Vitch. She said she would be glad to help me and offered to look up the name of Mary Concannon, within the approximate bands of time that I outlined. She said it was a very common name around Connemara and there might be a lot of them, so I might as well do something useful with myself in the meantime, such as walking into the city or by the Corrib river.

  I went into a few shops and accidentally came across a tin toy for Rita. I was delighted with myself because my alibi was complete. A robot man, painted red. The woman in the shop set it in motion so he walked across the counter in a stiff stride with his arms moving. I bought it and she placed it into the box for me. There was a sticker on the box saying this was not a toy and not suitable for children.

  By the time I got back to the convent, I discovered that Sister Consuelo had been looking up only the death records for some reason, so I had to explain to her again that there would not have been any death certificate. In the eyes of the church and the state alike, she was possibly still alive or had emigrated and died in a foreign place.

  By then it was too late for her to do any more for me and I had to come back the following day at noon, which ruled out doing a trip to the islands. The weather had turned bad overnight, in any case, with a serious storm coming up, so I would have to keep that part of the journey for another time.

  Next morning, Sister Consuelo dug out a list of possibilities, all identical female babies named Mary Concannon and born in Furbo, in and around the turn of the twentieth century or after. She explained to me that the district of Furbo contained as many as twelve smaller sub-divisions or townlands with names like Ballynahown, Seercin, Derryoughter, Trusky East, Polleney, Ballard and Rough Furbo, all within a stone’s throw of each other and all divided into strips, more or less, from the bog to the sea.

  The list of names was written out in neat, frail handwriting. For some reason, Sister Consuelo had included the name of Julia Conncannon who had died aged eighteen and was buried in Barna, 1922. What happened to her, she didn’t know. Perhaps it was hard to accept the story of a pregnant woman being drowned and she gave me the option of supplanting it with another, more legitimat
e, tragedy.

  I thanked her and took the list with me. Later, I looked at the names and the date of birth in each case. It was impossible to say for certain which one it was. Not even Johnny Concannon could do that because the names went back so far, beyond human memory.

  I thought of the church in Barna with the high windows. I thought of the echo that might bounce back from the walls, even when the church was packed. The sudden emptiness, the sudden weakness in her stomach when she heard her name being announced from the pulpit in front of her people. She would have known it was coming. She would have heard the rumours drifting behind her and would not have been surprised by the words of the priest, only the severity of the judgment, asking her to have the decency to drown herself and the child.

  How must she have felt, leaving the church that day, turning back home under the gaze of all the men and women outside? All the neighbours and friends whom she knew by name but who now saw her as a complete stranger. What about her family, her mother and her sisters, what would they have felt, seeing her walking away alone? Her legs hardly able to carry her weight. The sickness in her stomach throwing up what little she had eaten and carried by the wind against the stone walls. Her coat hiding the bulge in her belly, denying herself and her future offspring, despising the sound of her own name and wishing that she and her child would become invisible. Her head spinning, wondering if she still had a place that could be called home. Her face white and already lifeless with panic as she walked back along the road with the clang of the priest’s words echoing in her head like a sentence of execution. How could she ever show her face in the open again?

  The big question remained, whether she drowned herself in the end or whether she was drowned by somebody else. Her death was not accidental, that much we can assume with certainty. She was murdered by the words of the priest and by the complicity of the people who failed to stand up for her, including her own family. Can it technically be called suicide, to be let down so badly that you were driven to it?