In Exile

by Billy O'Callaghan

  Reluctantly, he drew deep of the rancid air and began to dig, gagging with the stench and with thoughts of what he might find.

  What he found was not the hand but a bare calf. With nothing now pumping through him but repulsion, he burrowed into the clammy stumps of herring and through the pile rose an ankle and a bare foot.

  It was a woman. The calf and shin bone were more or less shaved clean and the small stubby toe nails showed the clear remains of flaking black nail varnish. Finnegan pulled away into a corner of the hold and began to vomit. He expelled little of substance and the recently consumed whiskey tore at his throat and flushed sour in his mouth, but he felt better for it. ‘Take it easy,’ he gasped to himself, reaching out with one hand for the support of the wall, but no part of him listened. He just wanted to get this thing done and to get out of there, back down into the cabin, back to the whiskey. He made for a higher point in the pile of fish, judging by the position of the foot roughly where the head should be, and he didn’t have to dig long before his hands felt the wiry scrub of hair. He lifted the body, head and shoulders, to the surface.

  Her eyes were open but fixed on nothing, and in the harsh overhead light her flesh had the greyish-blue tinge of decay. It was a terrible thing to see, but hypnotic too. He stared at that face, awaiting the glimmer of recognition to spark in his mind, but the mask of death made it a long time in coming. Then, in a way as sudden as the urge to vomit had been, some veil slipped and he knew her.

  ‘Maggie,’ he whispered, the name scraping from his trembling mouth. Just Maggie; no surname that he had ever heard. She did business down along the docks, a wretched creature for as long as he had known her, a length of time that must have been going on for surely twenty years. A prostitute, reduced by age and alcohol and God only knew what kind of drugs to the very lowest rung of society’s ladder. It hadn’t always been so, but for a long time she had played the wretch, her hard, thin body stooped, her hatchet face far removed from her actual mid- to late-thirties age. Earning a crust from the fishermen staggering back to their boats after a night of hard drinking, and the cold back-seat dawns with the sick businessmen on their way to the city and a life far removed from the one she lived. Sometimes from the boat, she could be heard laughing as if in joy, but it was a cold sound, unsettling. Like an asylum shriek. It always made him want to turn away.

  Looking down into that contorted crone’s face now, it was hard to imagine a time when it had flexed kindly with youth, or that she had ever known any kind of beauty. But she had, if only the desperate sort that leads to no good things. Tawny middle-length hair fell lankly from her head and one black strap of a cheap dress cut into the bowed collarbone inside her narrow shoulder. The other strap hung loose and broken, and the dress sagged in a way that exposed most of the fleshy sweep of one small breast. Finnegan didn’t want to touch her, though as a younger man he, like so many others, had paid his pittance over to her for that small pleasure more than once.

  The urge to run welled up inside him, but he hated the idea of letting her lie there all alone in the blackness with the herring, and he steadied his footing and lifted her free. Cradled in his arms her weight was negligible, a thing that seemed most tragic of all. Her head rolled over the crook of his arm, and he tried not to see her death in his mind.

  There was no way that he could see to lift her out on deck so he settled for laying her in a corner of the hold. Then he peeled off his rain slicker and spread it down over her face and upper body, and without further thought, hauled himself out through the trapdoor and back into the sweep of the storm once again.

  In the cabin, no one had moved. They looked up when Finnegan returned, soaked to the bone without his oilskin coat, and watched as he eased back into his seat, poured himself a whiskey from the bottle and drank it off in one long, unsteady swallow. Then he poured himself a second and lingered over it.

  Browne cleared his throat, thought to say something but instead just shrugged and kept his silence.

  ‘It was a woman,’ Finnegan said, voice a husk with the whiskey. He looked into his mug. ‘Maggie.’

  ‘Maggie?’ Browne said. ‘Not Maggie from back …’

  ‘Yeah.’

  After that they worked through the bottle and on into a second, not in the rabid way of usual but just to fill a void. Outside, the music of the storm was an ever-present. Finne­gan parted with details almost grudgingly, offering only fragments at a time. Somewhere into the second bottle, Lavery, with enough facts to hand, lay out his thoughts as to how it must have happened, how some customer, either by accident or in anger, had broken her neck. Probably right there on the dockside. The Bella Vista’s hold was a dark place, better than the water because maybe she’d float there and be seen. Or maybe the whole thing was blind panic and the Bella had just been unluckily convenient.

  Near dawn they had all consumed enough whiskey to sleep, but Finnegan didn’t want the dreams that he knew were waiting, and instead he left them and went up on deck to watch for light. The storm had mostly blown itself out over the past hours and the wind had fallen away to just a strong breeze. The sea still held a swollen shape that continued to rock the boat even with the secure bindings of the ropes, and rain fell but as a light drizzle. He moved to the bow, the furthest point from the hold, and gazed off into the darkness. Sometimes the touch of the lighthouse’s crawling beam fixed itself out across the water but mostly the night’s cover held. It was cold and wet without his coat, but it let him feel alive, and that was what he needed most.

  He didn’t turn when he heard the footsteps crossing the deck.

  ‘Luke,’ he muttered in acknowledgement. On a boat, you quickly learned to identify people by their step.

  ‘Skip,’ Luke said, and moved to stand alongside. ‘Storm’s blown.’

  ‘I reckon.’

  ‘We pulling out soon?’

  Finnegan nodded. ‘Couple of hours. Let ’em sleep a while.’ In the darkness, Luke looked pale and very young. His droop was pronounced by the cold and his long mouth was pinched into a slit. His big eyes were filled with faraway things. ‘Why aren’t you catching a few z’s yourself?’

  ‘Wasn’t feeling all that tired.’ Finnegan knew that it was because he was thinking about the dead woman in the hold.

  This was a time that most of the boats should be setting out, but the bay was quiet. Probably, the men of the other boats had steeled themselves against the storm and were still sleeping off the effects, propped up against a bar or in some bed paid for by the hour.

  ‘Are we going with Lav’s idea about dropping the body in the Sound?’ The boy’s voice was straining for casual but Finnegan felt something stir in his mind, an alarm bell signalling something not quite right.

  He didn’t turn from the ocean and kept his own words steady. ‘You mean Maggie?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Whispered in a small voice.

  Finnegan rolled his shoulders. ‘I suppose it’s best,’ he conceded, ‘even though it doesn’t feel right.’ Now he glanced at Luke. Silence was no friend to the boy, and suddenly he was certain. ‘I’m still not decided. Maybe calling in the law would be best.’ It was like baiting a hook, and just sitting back to wait for the desperation of the pull.

  Luke fought it, but to no avail. ‘What about what we were saying, about the fingerprints and the fit up and all of that? And you’ve been down there yourself now, so you’ll be all over the scene.’

  ‘Still not much to go on,’ Finnegan said. ‘Not really. It’s my boat, after all. No court would nod to that.’

  ‘Yeah, but don’t forget. Even if they believe us, they’ll impound the boat as evidence, won’t they?’ All pretence of calm was abandoned now. ‘Lav’s right. The Sound’s the easiest way, for all of us.’

  The silence after the outburst felt like a judgement, and Finnegan let it spin out, then asked, ‘Why, Luke? Why did you kill her?’

  Luke stood trembling and if there was one final consideration of denial then it quickly passed. He br
oke, fell to his knees and, with his face cupped in his large red hands, began to cry. Finnegan stood there, looking down at the bow of head and shoulders and the arched back now jerked with the heaves of long-held anguish tearing loose. He offered no touch of comfort, just waited for the tears to pass and for his question to be answered. He had seen and done a lot of things himself, not all of them paid for. Wasn’t that how it was for everyone? But he couldn’t find it in him to feel sympathy, not for something like this. So, he stood and waited, and when enough time had passed the worst of Luke’s hysterics eased.

  ‘It was an accident. I swear it was.’ Pleading eyes scoured his captain’s face for some kind of mercy. What he found there was enough to continue. He bowed his head and his words came in wet whispers, staccato stabs on tremulous breath. ‘I was coming back to the boat and she was just there. She tried me, you know, laughing and saying that I must be a big boy to be out so late. I’d been drinking and I guess I was drunk, and her offer sounded good.’

  He broke off to support himself against a shuddering wave. His mouth twisted in a gesture of loathing. Finnegan wondered if the loathing was for Maggie and what she was or for himself and what he had done. A safe guess would be a little of both.

  ‘I was curious, you know, about what it was like. And it was pretty dark down there, so I didn’t have to see too much. But then she started to scream that I was hurting her, that I didn’t have to play so rough, and I guess I hit her, just to shut her up. I swear I never meant to …’

  Still on his knees he hunched down and began to cry again, not with the same intensity as before, just the soft tears of fear tempered with a certain relief of a weight ­lifted.

  Finnegan turned his eyes to ocean again. The drizzle had eased. Far to the east a pale white slash cut water loose from sky, though for a time to come yet they would continue to share a deep slate colour. After the storm the heavy swell still roiled, but for Finnegan at least it offered a sense of calm, the welcome isolation. Out there, the whole world was reduced to a length of twenty-four feet, a world he governed in a manner right or wrong. Even now, lashed to a pier, his word still ruled. Something eased within; he had made up his mind.

  ‘Get up, boy.’

  Luke moved slowly upright but remained on his knees. Even then, man and boy were almost of a height.

  ‘Get up I said. We have work to do if we want to make the Sound at a decent hour.’ He spat overboard and began to move around the pier side of the boat, but he stopped with the sound of the small child’s voice rising behind him. He didn’t turn back, just stood.

  ‘So you’re not going to the guards?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Finnegan just grunted. It was a nothing sound, certainly not an acknowledgement. ‘This is my boat and I am responsible for my crew. We’ll go out to the Sound and, like Lavery says, we’ll empty the hold. Damned waste.’

  The ache of tears was choking Luke. ‘I won’t let you down again, Skip.’

  ‘You’re right about that. We should be back to port in three days. Maybe while ashore you’ll decide that fishing’s not really your thing.’ He paused to let there be no misunderstanding as to the intent of his words. Then he grunted again, a scratched sound, basted in hard, sardonic laughter. ‘Funny, my money would have been on Lavery or Browne. Never you. Not in a million years. Damned waste.’

  Then, leaving the boy alone on the helm, he moved away to the part of the boat that was still wrapped in darkness and began releasing the binding ropes from the pier’s stanchion poles in anticipation of the day.

  Tourist Season

  In recent years, tourists have begun to discover the island, drawn by the glossy postcard images of misty summer dawns, quaint villages and the brilliant sunsets that burnish the placid waters of Gull’s Cove, drawn too by the notion of a land still pretending to exist outside the passage of time. Occasionally they stop us to ask for directions, and they are always well-mannered, their voices full of rolling Dublin brashness or clipped Germanic precision. The men sport the first dustings of a holiday beard and for some reason always look older than the women, and the women are usually blonde and manage to look pretty even when decked out in a designer raincoat or poncho. Women who like to be prepared. And we smile and make a play out of telling them the places they should be seeking out, our island’s best kept secrets. The island is small, roughly as long as it is wide, maybe three and a half miles from water to water, so we understand that it is less the directions they want than the opportunity to converse, however briefly, with a local.

  Tourism has become important, even critical, to our survival. It is our bread and butter, now that the fishing industry is all but finished.

  At night, in Costigan’s, we settle into our well-worn ­places at the bar and start in on the serious business of drinking, and now and again we mutter in Irish amongst ourselves, not really for privacy’s sake, though that is sometimes a consideration, but because it is our language still, though it is on the wane. When the tourists push through the door we look up, nod a welcome and then quickly look away, and after just the slightest hesitation they gravitate towards one another, strangers made to share the bond of foreignness. French couples sit with Americans, people from Cork chat with people from London, but until the music starts they must feel exiled there in the corner snug or at the tables and low stools in the middle of the floor, and they compensate by talking a little too loud, or maybe it is just the way that people used to grappling with the noises of a city have learned to talk. Their voices punch through the rumble of the barroom, intent on swapping details with their newest best friends of places they visited today, or yesterday, places like the shale beach out at Tully’s Point or the truly stunning views to be had from the picnic spot up at Crom’s Well.

  Then the music starts, and it is we who are exiled. Mulgrew and his spinster daughters huddle in the corner and play jigs and slip-reels that have never been written down, tunes that have been passed along through generations of players and which have made it from our shores only as far as the wind can carry them. A bodhrán keeps time for a fiddle and a tin whistle, the instruments worked by hands and fingers worn to stone but made so skilled by years of nights spent at the fireside. Loneliness simmers in the racing notes as the fiddle leans out of its jig and goes screaming away on a few minutes of lament, but it is theatrical, a hollow nod to bygone times.

  And afterwards, the cap is passed around, the navy corduroy made damp from old Mulgrew’s exertions, the two or three hours with his neck bent to the fiddle, and we dig for the loose change weighing down our pockets. The few coins that we can spare lie scattershot above the tourist offerings, the Euro notes, fives and even tens, money earned in ways that can be more casually spent. Tonight’s music was meant for them, and they are happy to pay for the privilege.

  The old man, Mulgrew, and his middle-aged daughters Áine and Cait, might be nothing more than colour now, a limited element of the ambience, but at least they have found a place for themselves in the changing ways of the island. By playing what the tourists want to hear, they can live more or less as they have always lived, playing their music and, when the hour grows late and quiet enough, singing the old songs, the drifting narratives tragic in word, desolate in melody.

  It is different for me. Over the past decade or so, the fishing industry has collapsed, and yet it remains a way of life for those of us who can do nothing else. The tourists enjoy lingering down around the waterfront, middle-aged couples in their knee-length trousers and with their yellow slickers billowing out around them in the breeze, holding hands to support one another as they pick their way carefully out along the short pier, the greenish algae-smeared timbers giving a treacherous edge to the idea of casual strolling. They watch us in our boats, not knowing that our lives now are just shadows of what they had once been, before the Spanish trawlers that come up from the Mediterranean and raked clean the ocean bottom, over-fishing along the limit lines of International Waters
. They see us as they see Mulgrew, not understanding what we have lost.

  I want the island as it was in my grandfather’s time, or my father’s, or the way it was back when I was just a child. These days the yachts come and go, just as they always have, eighteen- or twenty-eight-foot slabs that boast of wealth beyond compare but offer no real connection at all to the sea. Those on board wear linen shirts and dark glasses, never anything of necessity, and they drink champagne and look too beautiful to be inhabiting our corner of the world. When I was a child we’d stare at them with awe, and I suppose that is no less so today.

  Reliable skiffs still mottle the harbour, but I’ll forever hold fond memories of how our lives revolved around the small timber currach boats, those oar-driven vessels with open bellies and flaking waterproof paintwork that for generations had served us so faithfully. There are still a few of us on the island who make our living from the sea, but we know that our days are numbered. The time is drawing close when it will become a thing of the past to row out with the dawn still only hinting at the horizon, rowing an hour or more out to settle over the places handed down to us through hundreds of years of lessons learned in hard and tragic ways and casting our nets for the mackerel that still come, or for the herring that come less and less now. A few of us continue to persevere, but it feels like fighting the tide, and month on month our numbers lessen as the others, mostly those with families, bow to the inevitable. We know the sea, as much as anyone can ever really know it, and though we could probably make a decent enough living, in the summertime anyway, at offering pleasure cruises, island tours or angling excursions, for those of us who refuse to bend such things would feel a little too much like play. We fight a big war, but yield to so many skirmishes.

  Sometimes of an evening, when I’m either sitting in my boat or crouched and busy at trying to mend the snags and tears in my nets as they lay stretched out on the pier, I’m aware of the tourists who like to photograph things. They come down just as night is threatening to close in because the air feels thick and other-worldly then and even though they understand nothing of the island’s ways they can feel the strangeness that is real and unreal at the same time. If the sky is clear and it is late summer the sun will lie down on the far edge of the water as a bloody western mess and spill itself out in a way that makes for just the most spectacular image an eye can ever hope to behold. But even if, as is more likely, the hour is banked in cloud, the glow of last daylight is still a thing worth seeing.