Eventually, I’d be missed in the house, and someone would come looking for me. ‘Come inside out of that,’ they’d say, my mother usually, or one of my older sisters, Nuala or Eilís. ‘You’ll catch your death standing out there. Come inside to the fire. The snow isn’t going anywhere.’ I’d follow them in, not realising until I felt the fire’s heat against my face and hands how cold the night really was, and with a smile I’d accept the mug of cocoa that my grandmother offered. She always made the best cocoa.
It is said that, in her day, she was a fine singer. She has sung for as long as I can remember, but the voice I have always known is a withered one, tempered by age. She’d sit there in the corner of her living-room on a small three-legged stool, her back resting against the bare stone of the wall, and she’d close her eyes, incline her head and drift into song. Aching narratives, old island laments for men lost to the sea, or for those fallen in battle. We’d listen, tapping our feet to invisible time, and my sister Gráinne – who had the best Irish of us all, and maybe the softest heart – would cry as the stories took hold. I had enough Irish to follow, and I knew the words by their flavours if not exactly their meanings, but it was the voice that would draw me in. My grandmother’s singing voice was so much stronger than her usual spoken way, which rarely ventured above a murmur. To hear her talk, no one would ever have guessed at the power concealed in those breathy words. When she began to sing, that power was less revealed than insinuated. I was a child and she was already old, and her voice rustled around the words, caressing them as her hard creased hands sometimes caressed my cheek in a moment of affection. I could feel the power, and it was there as I grew.
Now when she sings, the power is finally gone, and the voice that always sounded both hard and soft to me is a mired sound, muddy and occasionally indulging in shapeless hush. She is confined to bed and, when we sit her upright and support her with cushions and pillows, the effort that it calls from her wizened frame is almost too much to bear. Lying down, she sings rather than talks, singing the songs we all know. We join in where we can, but softly, because it takes nothing at all to drown her out. She also plays games with time, and it can be difficult to keep pace with her.
A few years ago, an archivist came to the island. One of those studious types connected with a university in Dublin, he was part of a group who had set themselves the task of travelling the country to gather and preserve a dying side of Ireland’s heritage. I was at home when he called, on one of my occasional sojourns back from what has these days become my life, working month-on/month-off shifts on the North Sea oil rigs.
He stood tall and drooping in my grandmother’s doorway, a young man of about my own age, but denim-clad and pierced, trying to explain himself in the kind of Irish that they only speak in schools. Some of the men in the village had told him that if he wanted the old songs he’d have to come and see my grandmother. I’d seen the likes of him before, one of those upper-class proletariat types who take a pair of scissors to the knees of their newly-bought designer trousers just so they will fit in with so-called ‘real folks’. His long fair hair bounced in curls around his shoulders and he wore a pair of round wire-frame glasses pushed right up to his eyes. I studied him openly and in silence until his act began to come apart, then I nodded and brought him inside.
From a battered leather satchel, he produced the smallest piece of recording equipment I had ever seen, a little silver hand-held box that cut the music directly onto a miniature disk, and for an hour my grandmother sat at the kitchen table and sang for him. She held her hands knitted together in the grip of prayer, her entwined fingers bent and red from arthritis, and she alternately closed her eyes or fixed them on me, while the words flowed of their own accord. Between songs she’d mutter the titles, sometimes translating and explaining them so that the visitor might better understand. A small smile of joy stretched the young man’s lips but he didn’t speak at all until it was time for him to catch the ferry back to the mainland, and then he thanked her. After he had gone we found an envelope that he’d dropped under the table. My grandmother’s name was scribbled across the back, and inside, five twenties. New notes, still shining from the bank. He had been too shy to hand it to her directly.
When I hear the way she sings now, lying in her bed so frail and emaciated, I sometimes think of that archivist, and how much he would enjoy this. Not for the voice itself – because that is a whisper of what it had been that day at the kitchen table, and stands as nothing at all against what people say it had been back in her youth – but for the mannerisms and shifting emphasis that old age has brought. It is as though the best lessons were in the act of loss itself, the ones most worth learning. The manner in which she bends the words, tormenting the time-worn rhythms of each song’s structure, makes it into a kind of Island jazz. Certainly, there is that same scatting sensation. A deathbed art is something surely worth preserving, I think, but I am alone in my appreciation. Gráinne cries as she listens, but she is no longer crying for the stories. My grandmother’s voice is a worn nub of past glories, but in the sacrificed lucidity of the diction there is such faithfulness in the sentiment. There are still things worth lamenting.
We spend a lot of time here, my sisters and I, and we’re waiting for the inevitable. The shifts I work make it difficult for me, because it is all or nothing: An entire month spent sleeping beneath this roof, followed by an entire month away, when my only connection is the weekly letter that it has become Nuala’s duty to provide. Every time I have to leave, I lean in and kiss my grandmother goodbye, and I am sure this will be the end. Occasionally she smiles a weary smile of recognition; more usually she calls me Dan, her brother, or Pádraig, her husband. Or other men long since dead to her. It hurts to hear that, but I answer her questions anyway, and then I take the ferry across to the mainland, the flight, and the other boat, until I am cut adrift, away in the North Sea, with a country’s distance lying between me and the island.
The oil rig can be hard work, and the constant back-and-forth journeying between there and home feels, at times, like a never-ending ritual of exile and redemption. But I have been doing it for more than seven years, and a man can get used to almost anything over such a length of time. On the rig, sitting on my bunk while the wind lashes the spew of the waves against the walls and the plastic windows, I tear open the envelopes as they come, fully expecting the bad word that has yet to arrive. I read of the arbitrary news from home, the usual tedium of small happenings in small lives, and tell myself I am glad she hasn’t passed yet, that I want to be there when it finally happens. But actually, I’m not sure that I do. It would be so much easier if the letter did break the inevitable to me, because as things stand, there is no comfort in waiting.
When I am at home, I sit in the corner of the bedroom for long hours, some unread book held open in my lap, and my grandmother lies there among her pillows and sheets, sleeping such a bottomless sleep that it cannot be much different from death. Sleeping, or else singing to the ceiling in that guttural voice. Her eyes are no longer with us, her mind, withdrawn, no longer offering the occasional glimpses and reminders of better times. I sit and watch, and I hate that I am waiting for her to die. But that is the fact. For almost a year, nothing has changed. The details are exactly the same, and I am not sure what I expect to see. ‘A watched egg never hatches,’ Nuala says, when she comes to relieve me so that I might wash and shave and get myself something to eat, and I know that she is right, we all know it, but none of us want the old woman to be alone when her moment finally comes. With every passing day, though, the shell grows more and more fragile, and it has to be soon that the final crack will appear. Maybe it will be a good thing if the news is broken to me by letter, the words easily fitting there among the mundane rest.
The snow is so light, and yet so complete. It fills the darkness, flecks that compromise the sky, and in the morning all that lightness will have amassed a considerable weight on the world. I like to stand out here on the back porch
to watch, because it brings the good things of the past close again. In my life, I have spent more nights under this roof than in my own home. Easily lost amid the clutter of eleven siblings, finding room for anything was a struggle. Here though, there was always room, and a welcome. My grandmother lived alone, and she seemed old even then, though until a couple of years ago she was a very able woman. I was company for her, she said, and she told my mother as much. So I was allowed to stay.
Her husband, my grandfather, died before I was born. I have listened to her tales of him, her descriptions of how he was so broad across the shoulders, and though not very tall, possessed of almost legendary strength, and I would have taken her words as fancy except that the stories have been confirmed by other old men of the island, men tucked in the late night snug of Flaherty’s public house, coming alive only when the talk turns to long ago. Pádraig Dunloe, a man to row and row. Pádraig Dunloe, my grandfather, whose name passed down to me.
‘Do you take after him, boy?’ the old men ask. ‘Are you a chip off the old block?’ I shrug my own broad shoulders and let them decide for themselves.
My grandfather went the way of many on the island – yet another lost to the sea. A hurricane, to hear my grandmother tell it, but certainly a storm. Pádraig and his brother Michael, two days off shore, with nothing but a prayer in their little nine-foot skiff. The stories were told of how, after they were thrown overboard, Pádraig had battled the great swell and actually made it to within a hundred yards of the shore before exhaustion finally broke him and he was pulled under. This, at least, is an idea heavily coloured with exaggeration. My grandfather did surely struggle, but no one could have known how close he came to victory since neither his body, nor the body of his brother, were ever recovered. Just a story, but such an end sounded utterly heroic to me, especially given the fact that my own father, Eoghan, had passed in far less spectacular circumstances, the victim of a sudden, brutal brain tumour, when I was three years old. Nobody told stories about him, and when they spoke of him at all it was with the resigned sadness of lost opportunities.
My name, the same as my grandfather’s, might have been the draw to my grandmother, somehow bringing the past alive for her again. Or it may simply be that she enjoyed my company. I certainly enjoyed hers. She could be very shy, and entire days often passed between us with nothing shared but a smile. But the darkness seemed to shield her, and at night she would talk, would tell her stories of times and people past, her words swaying effortlessly between English and Irish. And when talking no longer seemed enough, she would sing her songs for me.
The nights of my childhood were always best. Until it was time for bed we’d sit together in the darkness, just the two of us, and I’d listen while she sang, joining in where and when I could. There were many nights when some of my sisters would come over, and more than a few nights when they all came, my mother included. A feeling of real kinship filled the house then, with everyone taking their turn to sing. Everything we sang was in the style of our grandmother, either consciously or unconsciously. You could hear her influence in the phrasing and in the tone. I remember Christmas time as always having a full house at night, thick to the rafters with song as the rain beat at the window or as the snow fell across the island. It felt good to be surrounded by family, but it felt better when the time came for them to leave, when they rose to undertake the mile-long trek back to my mother’s cottage. The old house had a lovely way of growing suddenly quiet, and we’d sit there beside the fire, my grandmother and I, not speaking, simply breathing in the warm smoky air and savouring the contentment of the moment. Seeing how the snow falls brings those nights back to me as though they were close still, and not lost forever.
I’ve shed my tears for her. To see her this way, ravaged to this uncertain state, does make death seem like a mercy. It was a mercy when it took my mother, some five years ago now, letting us remember something of what she was like before the lung cancer could fully break her apart. But when death will come for my grandmother, I’ll understand that it is for the best, but I’ll still cry because now, whatever her condition might be, I still feel as though she is here for me. I can talk to her and it doesn’t matter that she no longer answers, no longer hears, and I can listen to her gibberish words, the simple blur of sounds to past things. And more than anything, I can hear the jazz-twisted growl of her old songs made properly ancient. She’ll die, and I’ll be glad that her pain is finally at an end, but I’ll cry anyway, and I’ll miss her.
Everything changes. They are building on the far side of the island. On Tadhg O’Brien’s place, there is now a small huddle of summer homes. Concrete boxes with black slate roofs, built for comfort but also for the view. O’Brien’s grandchildren no longer want to farm the land; farming is hard work here and there is quick, easy profit to be had in selling out to the mainland’s rich. Soon that idea will reach us on the western side, and our views are worth even greater cash value, affording as they do the magnificent bloodstained sunsets of late summer, that last hour of a long day when the placid sea blisters and is set alight. When our time comes, we’ll sell too. The past is never permanent, constantly overlapped as it is by the present. The people from the mainland will come and make our coastline home for two or three months of the year, they’ll sit in the old pubs, sipping fine imported whiskeys and glasses of stout, listening with all propriety and tapping their feet to what must seem like the nonsensical gabble of the old songs. Going native, they’ll call it, their way of unwinding until it is time to return to the mainland and the stresses of their city work. A few of the old stock will linger, press on and endure the usual winter toils, but they will become the exception rather than the rule, and they’ll come to rely on the summer economy for their survival.
Such changes are coming, and quickly, but whether they will happen in my own lifetime, I can’t say for sure. Certainly though, my grandmother won’t live to see them. She may linger a while, but eventually she’ll go, and sooner rather than later. She’ll pass away and we’ll mourn her, and there will be nights when she’ll come to mind as nothing more than a vague sadness, because time heals that wound even as it brings others. She’ll go into the ground with those of her people who have gone before, another finished seed for the stony dirt of the sloping hillside. And maybe a day will come when they will be digging a hole in that ground for me, or maybe I’ll have long since said my good-byes to this place.
All of that is ahead. For now my place is here, waiting for another end. Standing on this back porch, watching the snow, the night has a calm and timeless sense about it. The sounds that make it through from the kitchen are the sigh of the kettle and the barely whispered talk of Eilís and my youngest sister, Cait. They are making sandwiches for yet another long night, and they talk about things of little or no consequence. The big issue, the reason for everyone to be here, goes unsaid, because there is no longer any need to speak of it.
A Killer Story
The thing about me is, I walk down the street or into a bar, nobody sees me as anything more than just another face. I’m nothing to look at; early forties, medium height, build leaning more and more towards thickset with the passing of every year. I suppose I’m not bad looking, but I’m certainly no Cary Grant either, or whoever it is that the ladies like these days. Johnny Depp, I guess. My hair is still relatively full, but I think that all the years of washing has washed the darkness out. I dress casual/smart, which is how I like it. Nothing too sharp, a nice suit but worn for comfort. Women still look, a certain type of woman, anyway.
Mostly though, I’m pretty anonymous. Average, I guess, is what you’d say, and average isn’t so bad, is it? Not many people would know by looking at me how I make my living. I probably look like a salesman or something, your typical Willy Loman type. Those guys really do exist. Sometimes, if I’m out of town and trying to pass an evening over a few drinks, I’ll play along to that. It’s a part that fits me pretty well. I tend towards a hotel bar when I’m on the road,
because that’s about the best place if you’re on the lookout for a bit of easy company, no questions asked, or none that require anything like truth for answers. Working at the scotch, slow but steady, and keeping up the flow of small-talk with some woman about my own age. A woman in town for nothing important, but made lonely suddenly by the road. In hotel rooms, loneliness can be catching. My routine follows a strict formula. Smiles suggested and nervously returned, the offer of a drink. Small-talk to beat the band. Her life in jigsaw puzzle pieces: sometimes single but more often divorced, the scrapheap desperation and the pinched wrinkles hidden by the poor lamplight. Pretty, though, when she smiles, and her voice kept low so that I have to lean in a little closer in order to catch the smoky allure of the words. Pretty, but in the way of memories, and hotel bars are made to encourage such a sense. The gloom brings her prime a little closer than it really is, and my own prime too maybe. I play the Willy Loman role, my salesman routine not yet dead but definitely dying. It’s been dying for years, and that works best for me. I never quite believe that she falls for it, but I understand that she is willing to go along with it for a while, because it’s better than the alternative, and there are things about her that I choose to ignore too. It’s part of the game. If it is a game. Who are we hurting? We’re ships in the night, and all we do is talk, the best way to beat the loneliness, no matter what anyone says. There are the usual promises made, on both sides, when we finally say goodnight, but she doesn’t believe them and neither do I. She knows that I am not Louis Mackley, or at least that I am not Louis Mackley the travelling salesman, but she never for a moment guesses who and what I really am. None of them do, not the women I meet for a while in a bar, not people I pass in the street.
There are lots of names for the kind of work I do, but basically it all comes down to the fact that I kill people for money. I’ll do a few jobs a year, more than enough to keep me. I am, by nature, a frugal type of person. I prefer to rent than to buy, because I move around quite a lot. Movement stimulates me. I don’t need much, don’t really like to encourage expensive tastes. I save most of what I earn; putting it aside for my retirement, my rainy day. I’m good at what I do, as evidenced by the kind of money that I can make from a single job and also by the amount of work that I am forced, for practical purposes, to turn down. I’m good at it, at killing people, and though I probably shouldn’t say this because it is the kind of thing that will make even psychiatrists who think that they have seen it all run screaming into the night, the fact of the matter is that I enjoy it. I love to kill people, the whole process of it, thinking up ways for them to die, planning the best way to achieve my objectives, and then setting my plan in motion. Everything is thought out with the utmost care and consideration. Each one has to be perfect.
In Exile Page 7
