Rosie from next door came out in her coat and slippers, saying that she had heard young people coming up from the seafront. She invited Mrs Concannon in for some tea and tried to make her feel better by saying it was a far cry from what went on in Northern Ireland.
Placed in perspective, the damage was slight. Nothing like the damage done inside the family.
The attackers had carried the green wheelie bin up the steps and leaned it against the door, igniting the contents, mostly paper and cardboard, adding vodka and Red Bull, perhaps. It was hard to imagine they went to the trouble of getting petrol. The bin itself had melted comically out of shape, reduced to a squat tub on wheels with volcanic, bulging layers. The front door was scorched, but intact. As expected, there was more water damage in the hallway than anything else. The main problem was the glass side panel. It had burst in the heat. Frosted stained glass that was over a hundred years old and almost impossible to replace.
I cut some pieces of plywood and sealed the broken panel shut from both sides for the time being. The door needed nothing. The scorch marks, in the shape of Africa, could easily be dealt with by the painters who were going to do the new window frame anyway, so the timing was not that bad. Why didn’t they set fire to the skip instead, with all the old wood inside? I wondered. It would have been less trouble and far more spectacular.
Kevin stood leafing through various explanations. He slowly realised that it was not his father who had done this. Instead, his eyes were on me, connecting it back to the death threat I had received. The combination exploded in his imagination.
‘It’s them, isn’t it?’
‘Who?’
‘Scumbags. That electrician you got in with.’
Next day, I started getting things back in order. I got rid of the bin. I installed a dehumidifier in the hallway to reduce the dampness and was already working on putting down the floorboards again. I even tracked down a stained-glass designer who still had a few panes of that particular glass left, so I was able replace the side panel. I later found out that the glass panel had been broken before. Once it was replaced, you would hardly think anything had happened.
But something had changed utterly. I could see it by the way they were looking at me and speaking to me. The scorch marks left on the front door. The new glass panel. The lingering smell of burned wood in the hallway. I had brought all this with me. I had introduced it into the country like an air-borne disease, spreading to the Concannon family.
26
There is no such thing as closure, is there? Only opening.
Ellis had become obsessed with unlocking her father’s absence. She could not stop herself from going on the adventure of blame and self-destruction, narrowing everything down to the missing parts of her life. She was like a child who has only just discovered the power of the light switch, looking around the room in amazement at the genius of her own invention.
‘This is my genetic inheritance we’re talking about,’ I heard her screaming at her mother.
‘Well, follow your inheritance,’ her mother snapped back. ‘If that’s what you want, go and be like your father.’
‘I just need to know what made me the way I am.’
I felt sorry for her mother. Only me left in the house, hammering nails down into the floorboards with all the noise I could possibly make, trying to pretend I didn’t know what was going on.
Ellis didn’t want to meet her father any more either. She only wanted to understand the cause of her own behaviour. Why she was destined to go downhill, sending the blame back along the family line. She matched herself up to the genetic trademarks of her father, a man she hardly even recognised when he stopped her in the street. He was the explanation for everything in her life that was outside her control. All the ingredients of her identity, her talents as well as her deficiencies. All those emotional detours and addiction problems. Lack of initiative. Shoplifting adventures. Criminal damage to public property. Why she once flirted with self-starvation.
She underestimated her own capabilities. The effect that she could have on people with her smile. A smile she inherited from her father, beginning at the corner of her mouth, then spreading to one side, right up into the eyes and spinning around her face like a flint-wheel toy.
She was living her life in spite of her mother rather than for her own good. Moving out of the family home into a crazy, free-fall scene with Diller. A dodgy apartment that was more like a landfill site, if my sources were correct, with the smell of refuse coming from the kitchen. And the ever-present drugs. The plastic, re-sealable pouch of tabs, the hand-mirror and the rolled-up bank note on the sofa.
Johnny Concannon was the only person who could supply an explanation for any of this. I visited him again one afternoon. We sat down and he took his time going over things, walking through his thoughts, as crooked and erratic as the stone walls and the landscape he grew up with. But in spite of his absence all those years, he seemed to have a father’s obsession with family details. A paternal talent for remembering important events regarding his own children. The disaster which led to him being expelled from the family.
He told me how he had come back to Dublin to make a go of it, rejoining his wife and three children with every intention of being a real father. After Rita had inherited the house, he tried to make things work and carried out some renovation work himself. He had so much energy then, doing things to make people happy. He got a job and they seemed to get on very well as a family. He loved telling stories and the children believed everything.
But there was always some imbalance, because Rita was a schoolteacher and the family home was owned by her. Even if it was dilapidated, her name was on the deeds, and no matter how much he worked on improving it, he didn’t feel it could ever belong to him. He admitted that he drank too much and that he squandered everything, until he felt more of an employee in the house, like myself.
He told me how things ended. He had bought the children a dog. A grown puppy, tearing up everything he could find. Utterly un-trainable because of all the affection he received, from Ellis in particular. He could recall the summer they went to a seaside campsite on the south coast. Rita tied the dog to the rear bumper of the car, so as to keep him from getting at the food and puncturing the children’s beach ball with his teeth. And there he was, Johnny Concannon, happily driving off in search of a bottle of wine, with the children screaming and running after the car. He waved back at them with his bare arm out the window, not realising that he was dragging this unfortunate pet dog off to such a brutal and spectacular death before their eyes.
Rita didn’t make things easy for him. She called him a waster, a dog killer. They returned early from the camping trip and he went out to get drunk, trying to forget about the dog he had buried on the beach with a plastic spade and bucket, crying to himself like a small boy. By the time he got home that night she had already packed his things into a suitcase, everything, including the All-Ireland hurling medal. She said she wanted him out of the house.
‘I don’t know what came over me,’ he said. ‘I saw my suitcase standing outside the door. I broke the glass and forced my way inside. She started telling me to fuck off back to England, as if that was my country.’
He punched her and she fell back, holding her mouth. The children were standing on the stairs, clinging on to the banisters as he left.
‘They’ll never forget that, will they?’
‘Children forget all kinds of things,’ I said, trying to help him out.
But I was wrong. Your childhood is like a dog tied to the bumper of the car coming after you, all the way into your adult life.
‘I threw it away,’ he said. ‘I have no family now.’
Then he decided to give me his All-Ireland medal, because there was nobody else who would accept it.
‘I would like you to have it,’ he said.
‘But this is not correct,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t be the right person for it.’
‘Of course you are,�
� he said, getting up. ‘You are the only person I have in mind for it now.’
He took out the red box with the gift wrapping still around it and gave it to me. I tried to refuse it politely, but he insisted, telling me again about the day that he had won it.
He had the need to gather some kind of imaginary family around him. He talked to me about his mother and father. The names of his brothers. The countries they emigrated to and what they were doing, how many were married and how many children and grandchildren they had. He gave me the whole family tree, spreading out into the future across the world, in case I was ever in a foreign country, he said, and needed somebody to call on.
I told him about my trip down to Furbo. I described the new hotel and the pagodas on the shore and the piano playing on its own in the dining room. I told him what little I had managed to dig out about Máire Concannon and he began to fill in the gaps, telling me what he knew.
‘Over the years the tide brought in more and more rumours after her,’ Johnny said. ‘Like the truth, I suppose, coming and going all the time.’
Some people referred to it as a crime. Others referred to it as a tragedy. Others still as a scandal. But whether it was suicide or homicide, double homicide at that, was almost impossible to answer.
For such a case to be established in court, you needed more concrete evidence than rumours expanding and contracting with the tide. Some said she suffered from what was called melancholia. What gave her melancholia was not known, other than what was said about her by the priest and the insecurity of her circumstances after that. The priest who denounced her from the altar may have been an accessory to the crime, having suggested drowning, voluntary or involuntary. But he was no longer alive to answer the charges.
Perhaps she was trying to save up enough money for the fare to London, Johnny suggested, and didn’t manage to get it in time before the moral curfew fell. Melancholia was possibly the convenient way of saying that she was in fear of her life and had nowhere to turn. She had lost the protection of the community, driven out of the parish, driven off the map and into the sea.
‘Are you religious?’ he asked me.
‘No.’
‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Because sometimes I wonder if this was an Irish re-make of the Blessed Virgin Mary story. When there was no father to be found, the story was written backwards with great flair.’
One of the rumours making the distance of time was that she was seen walking out into the waves, close to where the big new hotel stands. Possibly on the beach or one of the shallow sandy places among the rocks where the water would have slowly risen around her dress all the way up to her chest until she fell beyond her depth and disappeared. Her frame of mind would have been frail. She would have seen even less hope in the land behind her than in the sea ahead of her. It was also possible that she might have walked to Barna and plunged from the wall of the small harbour there. If so, she would only have had her own thoughts for company as she passed by the grey house, speckled all over with white discs of lichen, like the face of an old woman staring at her and saying nothing.
Perhaps she spoke out loud to the baby inside her belly as she walked, and people hearing her going by would have thought she had gone mad.
Why did nobody stop her? What about her sisters, her mother, would they not have tried to hold her back? She could have been overpowered. They could have changed her mind. But if they had done so, they would have become accomplices, breaking the word of the Lord, as it was known. So it had to be assumed that nobody went to her assistance, if that was how it happened.
Further rumours alleged an even darker ending in which she may have been taken out by boat against her will. It was said by some that she had been seen on the water in the company of some men, family members, brothers, uncles, local men, her own father perhaps, even the priest himself, who knows? All the suspects in this case, you might say, including the man whose child she was carrying and who for some reason or other could not marry her to make things right in the eyes of the church. All the paternity suspects who were so terrified by the consequence of birth that they might have been driven by any means to silence her.
Was she about to reveal the identity of the father? Was that why she was drowned?
Another question. This may not have led to any particular conclusion in a criminal investigation either. It would not have closed the file, so to speak, but it might have helped to explain something inside my own head.
‘Why was her body not claimed by the family?’
‘You have to understand the times,’ Johnny said. ‘And the geography. Often they used to bury the bodies where they landed. There might have been heavy seas preventing the family from going over at the time. It was not unusual for people from the islands to be buried, for example, on the mainland, if that’s where they were found.’
‘They never went out to find the grave or put a headstone on it?’
‘They would not have had the money to do that,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so, anyway.’
‘No identification mark of any sort?’
‘Nothing apart from the place being named after her,’ he said. ‘Where her body was discovered.’
That was the only inscription, the location on Inishmore known to the people there as Bean Bháite, drowned woman.
There was no evidence of grief. Her mother and her sisters would not have been allowed to express it in the open, not in any ritual passage. No funeral. No wake. Even when the fine weather came back, nobody would have been permitted to go out and find her grave. Nobody would have gone to the island to say a prayer or lay down some flowers and wonder if it was a boy or a girl.
At this point, Johnny told me about a lament in the Irish language which talks of drowning. He spoke some of the words and translated them. He explained how the drowning in the song was first compared to a wedding, with horses and people gathered in the street. But then it turns into a funeral. The drowned person was normally brought ashore and placed on a wooden board. ‘Ar chlár’ was the term for it. Laid out on a board. Maybe even a door taken off the hinges. From there, the body would be carried home to the house where a bed was made up for it to lie in. The mourning would then begin and the wake would go on through the night and not for one minute would the body be left alone. The song speaks of how the drowned man’s bed was never as well made as this before.
Máire Concannon would first have been laid out on a board, down at the shore, just above the tide line. She would not have been brought to any house or laid in any bed. There would have been no grief and no wake and no singing.
Johnny then began to sing the song.
Tá do shúile ag na péiste,
S’tá do bhéilín ag na portáin,
S’tá do dhá láimhín gheala ghléigeal
Faoi léirsmacht na mbradán.
The maggots have got your eyes,
And the crabs have got your mouth,
And your fair white hands
Are in the salmon’s domain.
27
The ending came quite abruptly. I was not expecting it so soon, with so little advance warning. I thought I was right in with the family, rock solid, until Kevin brought me for a drink one night after work and gave me notice to quit.
‘Listen, Vid,’ he said. ‘I think it’s probably best to wrap up as soon as possible.’
‘Wrap up?’
‘The work,’ he said. ‘Finish the job.’
‘Finish the job?’
‘It’s my mother,’ he said. ‘She needs a break from all this building and shit.’
‘You don’t want me to do the kitchen?’
‘Not now.’
‘No bother,’ I said.
‘We’re worried about Ellis, as you know.’
‘Of course.’
‘We’ve nothing against you, Vid,’ he said. ‘It’s just dragging on a bit, that’s all. My mother needs to get the house back to herself.’
‘No bother,’ I said.
; ‘And stop saying “no bother”, will you? Sounds really fucking stupid with your accent.’
This was the first instalment of the farewell. He tried to assure me that it did not reflect in any way on my character, only that the fire at the house made his mother very nervous. He blamed the scumbags and said he would have to put in an alarm system.
As if to illustrate the point, a fight broke out in the bar we were in. At the other end, there was somebody laughing and accusing another man of being a drug dealer. Nothing more than that. People were constantly saying things about each other here that had no basis in fact. Just for the fun of it, they would call somebody a knacker or a wanker without any proof whatsoever. But this time, the accusation was taken seriously. There wasn’t even time for a fight to develop. The alleged drug dealer just walked away, leaving the other man standing at the bar with pieces of glass sticking out of his neck, still laughing for a moment until it gradually sank in what had happened. It was mostly by reading the reaction of the people around him that he knew something was wrong. People moving their drinks away to other tables. Empty space opening up as the blood began spilling on to the floor in bright dribbles. By the look on his face he seemed to be asking himself what made him so ugly and friendless all of a sudden. He held his hands up, like parentheses around his neck, afraid to touch himself or the bubbling fountain below his chin. Falling back into the abandoned tables and letting out a restrained, mechanical scream.
Hand in the Fire Page 18
