‘I’ve never liked Blackrock,’ Cora says. ‘There is always a cold breeze blowing.’
‘Yes, you’re right there, Flannery,’ I say, looking out across the stone-walled fields and farmsteads. ‘Just our luck in Dundalk to have the only unappealing strip of seaside in western Europe — excluding England, of course. Blackrock deflates the soul. It’s depressing. A move out there would sit somewhere between a mistake and a bad idea.’
‘Shauna’s not alone,’ Declan defends from the front seat. ‘Half of Dundalk would move there, if they could only afford to. It’s a nice place and very popular. You just don’t see it.’
I keep my gaze on the green hills. ‘That’s very true, brother — there’s many who view Blackrock as a desirable address. God help them, but in that act alone they contribute to a portrait on the fickleness of human nature. People need protecting from their own wants.’ I turn again into the car and throw a suggestion forward. ‘So it’s going to be a long way from the ghetto of Cox’s for Miss Clifford?’
‘Ard Easmuinn, Johnny, if you don’t mind,’ Declan laughs. ‘Ard Easmuinn.’
‘Yeah, well, whatever. I’ll say one thing for her. At least she has you moving in the right direction in Bay Estate.’
He doesn’t reply as I look at the road ahead of us.
‘Just over this little bridge, Declan, and pull in there on your left by The Lumpers.’ We stand in the midday air and watch as Declan turns the Fiat in the gravel yard of the small country pub. On the other side of the road there is a wooded rise.
‘Trumpet Hill,’ I say, looking across. ‘That’s the famous rise of Ochaíne in the tale of the Táin. From that hill, Cúchulainn bombarded Medb’s armies with his slingshot.’
The car stops.
‘Are you sure you’re all right for a lift home?’ Declan asks from the open driver’s window. ‘I don’t mind a spin out to Carlingford for you.’
‘Thanks, but my daddy’s picking us up,’ Cora answers.
‘Okay,’ Declan shouts, driving off. ‘I’ll be in the snooker hall if you need me.’
We wave him off as the car returns to the road and re-crosses the humpback bridge, with Declan’s arm raised in farewell through the open window.
‘I’d say we’ve time for a cup of tea, Cora dearest.’
She takes my arm as we walk towards the door of the pub. ‘Haven’t we all the time in world, Johnny.’
‘Are you coming or going?’ the heavy-set barman asks as he places the pot of tea on the table before us.
‘Sorry?’ I ask, arranging the order on the table.
‘On the walk. Are you coming or going?’
‘Going. We’re walking over to Carlingford.’
The barman nods and returns to his post behind the bar.
‘Fair dues to you, son,’ the only other customer in the pub calls across to us. ‘There’s very few who ever know if they are coming or going.’
I look to an elderly man sat at the bar; he is stooped over the horse-racing pages of an opened newspaper. He has paused his reading, anticipating a response, but we remain unprovoked and ignore him. When we finish, Cora carries the pot and cups to the bar.
‘A fine day you picked, too,’ the horse-racing reader tries again. ‘God is good. There are days up there when the east wind can cut you in half.’
‘Good luck, now,’ I say into the pub, tidying my scarf in the Dunn & Co, and opening the door for Cora. ‘If we are not back by Christmas, call for help.’
High hopes
WE TAKE THE RUTTED ROAD THAT RUNS ALONGSIDE THE GRAVEL YARD, and walk up into the mountains. A few houses are strewn along the road, and a few more are scattered on the lower hills. There is no one about, all is quiet, and the mountains above are empty. It is a fine day. The weather in the previous weeks has been everything — one hour couldn’t be trusted to predict the next. That’s the way it is in Ireland: the seasons only loosely perform to pattern and definition. It seems the island exists in some kind of fixed meteorological arrangement with the North Atlantic, a kind of permanent grey winter. But sometimes there are breaks in that grey arrangement; and when they come, the land lifts with deep, rich colours, and the wait is rewarded. Today it seems that the mountains and sky have conspired, have gathered and saved a few hours of sunshine, and spill it now on the hillside as an offering, a welcome, just for us.
It was Cora’s idea to take the walk. It is the twenty-eighth day of the month, a Sunday, and it’s six months today since the first night I walked her home. Cora insists that we need to celebrate, and so she has us out here on the mountain. We leave the road where it meets a river at a cluster of homes near Ballymakellett, and where a path veers off into the conifers of Round Mountain Forest. We climb a wooden gate to enter the forest, and as we go over I point north to the next rise.
‘Doolargy Mountain,’ I say. ‘And behind Doolargy is the secret high valley of Dubchoire — The Black Cauldron. And it was there, Cora, that the Brown Bull of Cooley was hidden as the desperate Queen Medb rampaged around the country in search of it. And as she searched for the bull, one by one the boy on the hill slaughtered her soldiers with his slingshot.’
‘Isn’t it totally mad, Johnny, that we are on the same path that Cúchulainn and Queen Medb’s armies used?’
‘Yes, Cora, total and all-out madness,’ I answer, putting my arm about her and kissing her head.
We climb the forest trail beneath the conifers for two miles, and on the hilltop we exit into heathland. Behind us is the rise of Castle Mountain, and before us is the heather-covered hillside of Moneycrockroe. A half-mile below, a small road runs north to south through a broad upper-mountain valley. A narrow scrape of a path leads down through the heather. Almost immediately, as we step into the scrape, a hare breaks from its hidden form, rushes across us, and disappears down the hillside. Cora follows the hare and walks before me. I watch her move through the scrape: the stepping of her red boots, the hop of her arse in the blue jeans, the dance of her golden hair above the heather. Below us is a valley of patchwork greens, and beyond the valley the bare, livid rock of Ireland rises.
At the bottom, we cross a wire-mesh fence on a wooden-stepped stile, and we continue south on the road. The tarmac of the road is comforting and solid beneath our feet after the unpredictability of the forest floor and the uncertainty of the heather slope. Quickly, we come to a junction above the boggy glen at Spellickanee. Dundalk is signposted south-east through the valley of Aghameen; our path is way-marked south-west to north-east. For two miles we walk on the mountain road. To the south and east, the mountain rock of Slievenaglogh rises and shields us from Dundalk Bay. To the north and west, the high gabbro peaks of The Foxes Rock, The Ravens Rock, The Eagles Rock, and Slieve Foye cut us off from the deep water of Carlingford Lough. Below us and between the mountain ridges is the broad, green valley of Glenmore. Wide-open grasslands fill the valley with scattered pockets of bracken, and stone walls meander to no definite pattern. A small river runs north-west to south-east along the valley floor, and a farmhouse beside a copse of woodland stands alone on the lower ground. A Táin Way trail-marker pointing at Slieve Foye pushes us off the road and onto a narrow lane.
We rest where the lane crosses the river, and sit facing the autumn sun with our backs against the metal side-rails on the flat bridge. As we rest, Cora asks that I tell her again the story of Cúchulainn and the Táin. And I do. I know it well; I must have read that story a hundred times.
‘Hey, sleepy head,’ I rouse her, gently, as she rests on me and the tale is finished. ‘We have a mountain still to climb.’
For one mile, we cross the green valley. We cross a second valley road and continue west by climbing broad, high grasslands. Mountain sheep ignore us as we climb high along the Golyin Pass and under the rough rock of Slieve Foye. The mountain of Barnavave stands to our south. Climbing north, w
e mount the crest of the pass, and the deep, dark waters of Carlingford Lough now lie below us. Across the lough, the higher Mourne Mountains rise from below the water to punch tall into the clear sky. Beneath us, in the shade of the mountain, the village of Carlingford grips the rock. At the edge of the village, two elbowed grey arms embrace a piece of lough water, and spots of blue and red can be seen within the arms. From hilltop to village, a grassy trail zigzags down the mountain through scattered gorse. A grey gunboat sits in the dark water of the fjord, at midpoint from the northern and southern shores.
‘The empire patrols the stolen lands,’ I say, with a gesture in the direction of the gunboat. ‘It claims and claims again the lands of Ireland, as if time and repetition justify the theft. But it knows nothing and it never learns.’ I don’t know why I do this, but sometimes I can go on a bit with that kind of talk.
‘What would Cúchulainn do if he were alive today, Johnny?’
I look to her, and words and intent fly around inside me. I want to tell her. But I cannot.
‘What could he do but fight?’ I answer her. ‘Though the people of Ireland would lock him up or have him shot. And once he was dead, we would think him a great lad. It is the Irish way. Those who challenge the ordinary and familiar are viewed as a greater threat than any oppressor. Right and wrong are unfixed: they are conditional on time and place.’ I sweep one foot across the short grass of the path, as if I might etch the argument into the mountain. I take a few steps forward and gesture across the water towards Northern Ireland.
‘Over there is hell on Earth.’
She looks to me; surprise is held in her green eyes, but she doesn’t interrupt.
‘Over there are two tribes, two peoples. One tribe are the children of neglect. They are locked in the attic and left to a neighbour’s care. It is an act of abandonment. But for the other tribe it is even worse. The other people are the orphans of history. They are nobody’s children.’
‘That’s a very sad account of things, Johnny-boy.’
‘It’s a very sad place,’ I continue, ‘so the current status must be broken, whatever the cost. What exists there is not real. One way or another, the foreign rulers must leave. And from the ruins Ireland can be rebuilt. Once freed from the unnatural, balance will be found. It’s the way of the world.’
‘But, Johnny, the British have rights, too, don’t they?’
‘Yes, sure. A right to be British? Yes. A right to live in Ireland? Yes. A right to live in Britain? Yes. But a right to live in Ireland and claim it to be Britain? No. That is no answer. They might as well claim the Earth to be flat. The children of tomorrow can never wear it. It cannot be worn. But we never learn. The history of Ireland is like our music — it circles and repeats.’
‘I don’t understand that. What do you mean?’
‘Ireland is perpetually plagued by division. Plagued by sons and daughters who would suffer rather than raise a hand or thought to revolution. There are yet those who still question the fight that won our independence, and measure all actions against an ideal state that never existed. There are yet those who would return us to another’s empire. Those, Cora, are the people of eternal compromise. Those are the people whose words have never carried anything but the death rattle of Ireland. But that is the Irish way; we are cursed to have two views on everything. This is our history, this is who we are, and this is our destiny.’
‘But …’ she pauses, and I watch her as she searches through what I have just said.
‘We are a divided people, Cora. There can never be an agreed Irish view on what is right and what is wrong.’
‘But Ireland is a great country,’ she says, as she looks out across the mountain. ‘Beauty, Johnny, and magic, too.’
‘Maybe. But not free, Cora. Not yet.’
She watches me. ‘Sometimes when you speak of Ireland, there is something about you I don’t recognise.’
‘Good or bad?’
‘I don’t know, Johnny.’
I offer her nothing but a wordless shrug.
‘You wouldn’t get involved, Johnny, would you?’ she asks. ‘What about those terrible bombs? You wouldn’t do a bad thing, would you?’
‘No, Cora,’ I answer. ‘I wouldn’t do a bad thing.’
‘Those bombs.’ She reaches to me and rests her hand on my arm. ‘Those bombs kill people, ordinary people — men like Daddy and Éamon, girls like Aisling and me, children like Cormac and Clara. They kill them as they wait on a parade or do their shopping. Children, mothers, fathers. You wouldn’t allow that, Johnny. Would you?’
‘No, Cora. I wouldn’t allow that.’
‘I know the cause is right,’ she says. ‘But then, at the same time, it’s not right.’
‘That’s the thing about war, Cora. It’s never right until it knocks on your door.’
‘What does that mean, Johnny?’
‘Well, it’s never right until they arrive at your door and take your father away in an armoured car. It’s never right until your brother or sister or husband or wife goes out in the morning and doesn’t come back. War is never right, until it calls to your door. And then what do you do?’
I look to her as she lifts her head, and she looks out into the air as she forces the argument through her own sensibility. ‘Anyhow,’ I say to her. ‘I thought you wanted us to build an army and throw the invaders out?’
‘That was just talk, Johnny. I want to go to college. I want to teach Irish. I want to get married, to have children. I want to picnic on Cúchulainn’s Castle and talk about Tír na nÓg. I don’t want war. I don’t want those bombs.’
‘Yes, you are right, Cora. A bomb in a marketplace serves no cause but spite. But those soldiers must leave — this still remains a war. And it has called to our door, whether we want it or not.’
‘Oh, Johnny, aren’t there already too many dead?’
‘The first one was too many,’ I say. I walk away downhill as if I might get away from my own words, and, spreading my arms wide, the Dunn & Co catching the breeze lifting off the lough, I call out, ‘They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think they have provided against everything. But the fools, the fools, the fools! — they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.’
She follows and takes my arm. ‘Couldn’t there be talking, to find peace?’
‘Politics? A world of fantasy and fraud. It’s the gathering-ground of the conceited.’
‘Isn’t politics how things get done, Johnny?’
‘No, Cora. Politics is mostly nonsense. If you had a recording of everything any politician ever said in the history of the whole world, and you deleted all but one-thousandth of the whole, what you would be left with wouldn’t make any less sense. Politics is a great lie, an endless cycle of hope and disappointment. Politics is compromise.’
‘Sounds like life to me, Johnny-boy. Isn’t compromise good enough?’
‘No, it’s not good enough. Nothing great was ever achieved by compromise.’
‘What about friendship? Isn’t friendship compromise?’
‘No. Friendship is not compromise.’
‘So what is it then, Donnelly?’
‘What’s what?’
‘Friendship.’
‘Friendship is understanding.’
‘What about love? Isn’t love compromise?’
‘No, Cora. Love with compromise isn’t love.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘With compromise, it’s just an arrangement — a set of needs and wants.’
She is uncertain. She looks to me. Her face is full of questions.
‘Love is commitment,’ I say, trying to teas
e the thing out through my own thoughts. ‘That’s why a man can only love one woman. That’s why a woman can only love one man. No matter what. Everything else is just passion, or intimacy, or lust, or fun, or need, or want, or whatever. But commitment is to one and to one only — otherwise it’s not commitment; otherwise it’s not love.’
‘Yes, I agree.’ She stalls, and moves the discussion as if still trying to get a fix on the direction our words have taken us. ‘What about de Valera? Michael Collins? They went to politics.’
‘Two great men. But de Valera lost the plot in the end. And Collins, maybe he was the best of them all, but …well, he did leave them abandoned up there.’
‘What else could he do?’
‘Politics, Cora. He compromised.’
‘Do you sometimes think of Éamon?’ she asks.
‘de Valera or Gaughran?’ I ask. I know she wants to break from the uncomfortable ground we have stumbled onto.
‘Gaughran.’
‘Sure I think of Éamon.’
‘I just sometimes think he’s a bit of a lost soul.’
‘He is that,’ I say, happy to ride along with the change of direction. ‘But he’s not so bad with it; it kind of suits him. We can all lose our way sometimes.’
‘Níl saoi gan locht,’ she says. ‘There’s no wise man without fault. Not even you, Donnelly.’ And she laughs as she lifts her head and tosses her golden hair into the air.
‘I love you,’ I tell her as I watch her.
‘Is that a fact now? Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Very sure. Only you, Flannery.’
She looks to me. Her face is now serious. ‘Do you really love me, Johnny?’
I am surprised by the suddenness and the strange place from where the question comes. ‘Of course I love you, Cora,’ I answer, holding her and noticing a fracture in her confidence — knowing I have said too much, knowing I have frightened her.
‘You wouldn’t leave me, Johnny, would you?’
‘No force could take me from you.’
A Mad and Wonderful Thing Page 10
