by Graham Joyce
“The snow was falling and I was shivering. I spotted a man with a dog walking back to his car. I stepped out of the trees and asked him if he would give me a lift. He flat-out ignored me and got into his car and drove away. I actually wondered if he even saw me. It was like I was a ghost trying to communicate with people on another plane. I was shocked by his rudeness. I felt cold and weary and overwhelmed, and I know I started crying.
“After a while a married couple came by. They looked like they’d been hiking. She had a patch over one eye, like a pirate’s patch. She paused and asked me if I was all right. I said no, I’d been dumped there and I needed to get back home. The couple exchanged looks, and then the woman offered me a ride. I saw myself reflected in the passenger window and suddenly appreciated what I must have looked like. I wasn’t very clean and my clothes hadn’t been laundered in the six months I’d been away.
“Once I was in the car the woman tried to break the tension by talking to me. She asked me if I was all ready for Christmas. I said that I was, but I couldn’t work out how it might have been Christmas, since I’d been away exactly six months and that would make it October. When she asked me where I wanted to go I gave her my home address. But when we passed through Anstey I knew everything was out of joint. The cars were all different, the buses were different. There were electronic signs that I’d never seen before. The roads had changed. The shops had changed and some old decorative storefronts had been replaced by plate-glass windows. Even the public telephones had changed—where were the old red phone boxes, so comforting and reassuring? It was all detail, just fine detail, but important detail to me on this homecoming day and it all felt wrong.
“I was beginning to panic. I think I was hyperventilating. The lady in the passenger seat turned her head to look at me with her one good eye. She asked me if I was all right. Even this seemed sinister to me, as if she were in on some joke.
“When the car approached the end of my street I got them to let me out of the car before we reached my house. I was nervous about going in. For one thing I anticipated a dreadful reception; but quite apart from that I couldn’t process all the changes that had taken place. A gas station had closed down and only its broken canopy remained, defaced by graffiti, a sheet of newspaper blowing across its forecourt. A newsstand had become a tattoo parlor. A housing development had sprung up like mushrooms after a night of rain, and a video camera, like a surveillance device, was angled down at street level.
“Even the door to our house had changed. Someone had added a white glass storm door to mask off our old blue door. And as I looked, an elderly man came out of the new door. He was a bald-headed man, with a tuft of white hair behind each of his ears. He looked beaten down by life as he opened his car door and climbed inside. And I realized it was Dad. It was my dad, and he was old.
“I know that I cried out. I bit into my knuckles. I couldn’t help it.
“As he backed the car out of the driveway—a new car I didn’t recognize, I turned and ran. I ran blindly, feeling like I should hide, hide my face. I had tears in my eyes and nowhere to go. I ran until I came to the crossroads, where the pub that used to be known as The Old Bell Inn had a new sign and had been rechristened The Snooty Fox. But I had no money to go inside, so I walked on and I came to the public library and I went inside just to get warm and to gather my thoughts.
“But even that place had changed. It had automatic doors! Inside, there were rows of TV screens and people were hunched over the screens. I had no idea what this all meant. I thought the people must all be watching television. The age of the Internet had arrived while I had been away.
“And then I laughed, because I knew what was happening. I was in a dream. I was still dreaming that I was on the back of a giant bee. All I had to do was wake up, but in order to wake up I first had to fall asleep, and then this strange dream would all be over, and I would wake up at home, a foolish schoolgirl who after falling asleep among the bluebells had had the strangest dream. I was exhausted enough to fall asleep there and then. There was a lounge area in the library with newspapers and magazines, and I sat there, holding on to a newspaper and pretending to read it while I dozed.
“And I did doze. But when I woke it was not to find myself at home. A librarian, a kindly lady with soft brown eyes, was shaking me awake. She apologized to me and smiled and said that I couldn’t sleep there and that they were closing the library for the Christmas holidays. She gave me a leaflet stating when the library would be open after the break. It had the dates and it had the year, all clearly printed for me to read.
“Of course I didn’t believe it. I had to ask the librarian what year it was. She didn’t answer me. Instead she asked me if I had somewhere to go. When I repeated my question she went away and came back with a piece of paper. It had an address written on it, the address of a hostel, she said, where people could get food and shelter over Christmas. She smiled at me again. It’s going to be a cold Christmas, she said.
“She thought I was homeless! But I wasn’t homeless; I had a home to go to, a family, loving parents, and a boyfriend. I walked back home again and I decided that whatever the consequences and whatever the circumstances at home, I had to declare myself. I didn’t have a key to the house but we always kept a spare key under a small boulder near the front door. I decided I would let myself in.
“But the boulder was gone. There was no key, and even if there was a boulder and a key the door had been changed, and with it the lock! I rang the bell and I knocked at the door, and no one was home. I decided to wait in the garage next to the house, to keep warm. Even the garage was piled high with unfamiliar junk, but I waited, and eventually my father returned in his car. I watched from the garage, spying on my father as he got out, and as an elderly woman struggled to climb out of the passenger seat. The elderly woman was my mother. Her hair had turned silver. Can you imagine how I felt when I saw my poor mum and dad, turned almost overnight into frail, silver-haired old people?
“I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to run to them, hug them, but I couldn’t. I was too overwhelmed by the change, the hideous aging that had taken place in them. Instead I waited, hiding in the garage as they shuffled inside. I couldn’t face the idea of presenting myself to them. I didn’t want them to look in my eyes or see my expression twisted with horror at the lines engraved on their faces and their snowy heads, so I skulked in the garage, paralyzed, bewildered.
“Darkness fell and I crept away. I walked the five miles into Leicester, in a kind of blindness, tears stinging my eyes. I found the address, given to me by the librarian, of the hostel. They took me in without asking questions. Most of the inmates were in a wretched condition—bag ladies and drug addicts or feebleminded women with their senses battered out of them by life. It was a grim place to be. I shared a stinking room with three other women. One of them talked constantly about a dead child; another curled in the corner, calling out in her sleep; a third ranted about how they wouldn’t allow any drink in the place. But it was warm. You could get a hot shower and something to eat. Eventually I slept.
“The next day was Christmas Eve. We were told to leave the hostel between eleven a.m. and three p.m. No one there seemed to have any idea of what they were supposed to do in those hours. I was given an old coat. I spent the time walking around the town, trying to take in all the incredible but minute changes. I went to the central library to get warm and someone there showed me how to read back through newspapers on a screen, and this I did, trying to get a sense of all the things that had happened since I’d been away.
“Twenty years. I’d lost twenty years. In my head I could no longer deny what had happened, but in my heart I was never able to accept it. I still can’t.
“And I knew that Hiero was following me. As I walked through the town I could sense him behind me. Sometimes he made an effort to remain unseen, and at other times he didn’t even care if I spotted him or not. He wanted me to know he was there. In the central library he sat up in the balcony,
gazing at me through a gap between the shelves.
“After a while he approached me. You see? he said. You see how it is? You see how you can’t come back here?
“I shut out his words and I focused on the newspaper archives, as if by an effort of will I could make him unreal, as if I could make all of this unreal. Eventually a male librarian came along and said, Is this man bothering you? Hiero sneered at the man but left without fuss.
“You see, I was in a state of shock. I had to process what had happened to me, and I couldn’t. I went out into the streets again and drifted by all the shops, all the plate glass imported into the High Street, all decorated for Christmas and boasting unfamiliar glittering merchandise.
“I went back to the hostel, not because I felt comfortable there but because I couldn’t face the truth, and I couldn’t face my parents. I ate a meal there and in the evening a choir came, a local choir from a school, made up of adults and children. They sang carols for us, and they sang so beautifully and with such feeling that I cried and cried and cried until no more tears would come, just hot salt stinging the backs of my eyes.
“I lay awake that night trying to work out what to do. When I did fall asleep I had bad dreams, and I was woken up when the woman with the drinking problem tried to get into bed with me. I screamed so loudly at her that someone came and led her away to another room.
“In the morning, Christmas morning, I decided that I would have to go home, whatever the cost, whatever the agony. I told one of the volunteers that I had a family after all, and that I should be with them. He was very kind. He drove me back to my house and waited while I knocked on the door. It had started to snow again, tiny flakes of snow, and I remembered how my dad would always bet on a White Christmas, and I wondered if he still did.
“When Dad answered the door, he didn’t recognize me. Then Mum came to the door, and, on seeing me, she fainted.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
On Friday March 15th, sometime in the morning Michael Cleary fetched the priest. The priest performed a mass in Bridget’s bedroom, while Bridget was lying in bed. That evening, according to Johanna Burke’s testimony, Bridget was dressed, and brought through to the kitchen. Johanna testified: Her father, my brother and myself, and deceased and her husband sat at the fire. They were talking about the fairies, and Mrs. Cleary said to her husband, “Your mother used to go with the fairies, and that is why you think I am going with them.” He asked her, “Did my mother tell you that?” She said, “She did; that she gave two nights with them.”
SUMMARY OF TRIAL TRANSCRIPT (1895)
Tara registered at the general hospital to undergo a CT scan, paid for privately this time, and yet without knowing it she found herself lying on the very same public health service flatbed and passing through the same doughnut-shaped scanner that Richie had stretched out on some days earlier; her scan was also supervised by the same radiographer who had photographed Richie. Tara was there at Underwood’s insistence. He wanted to see if there were any signs of trauma to the brain—recent or old—that might explain an amnesia spanning twenty years. Underwood conceded that even if a trauma were exposed by the scan, it would be difficult to explain why her memory before her departure and since her return seemed to be in perfect working order; but then, he said, the workings of the human brain were often unfathomable, particularly in the process of the recovery.
The brain, he said, could hide twenty years of experience, but that didn’t mean those experiences weren’t there.
Knowing that Richie was waiting for her in the hospital parking lot, Tara lay still as the radiographer stepped out of the room to trigger the scanner. She was deeply worried about Richie. On the way to the hospital he’d had to stop the car, so severe was his latest migraine attack. He had parked, closed his eyes, and held his fingertips to his temples while she sat helpless in the passenger seat. After about ten minutes the attack had subsided and he carried on driving her to the hospital. Tara had wanted him to come inside, into the waiting room, but Richie said he preferred to tip back his seat so he could try to rest quietly in his car. Plus, of course, you couldn’t smoke in the hospital.
As the X-ray flickered over her, reset, and flickered again, she had three things on her mind. One was Richie, one was Mrs. Larwood, and one was the charnas flower made up by bugs.
Tara’s visit to the elderly lady living across the street from The Old Forge had been a strange one. Jack had somehow managed to communicate, or her parents had, after relaying Jack’s message, that the old lady’s request to see her was somehow urgent. But when it came to it Mrs. Larwood wasn’t offering anything more pressing than tea and biscuits. Tara concluded that the old woman was simply being nosy. Perhaps she had been around the neighborhood when Tara had disappeared and now just wanted to satisfy her curiosity.
But all the time she’d been in her house, Tara had felt the old lady was circling her, gazing with her cataracted eyes, probing, looking for confirmation of something unexpressed. When Tara came to the conclusion that her visit had no real purpose she had excused herself, but the old lady had gotten up and escorted her across the street back to The Old Forge. Only the appearance of Jack throwing bags over the gate and behaving in a furtive manner had given her the opportunity to get free.
Tara knew perfectly well that she herself was the peculiar one, the one with the outrageous story, the one seeing a shrink, but she often thought that everyone around her had a very breakable shell, too. Meanwhile, the effort of maintaining a singular belief in the face of overwhelming opposition was exhausting. Tara could see how easy it would be simply to give way, to accept that she was deluded, to let the memory become a ghost and to then let the ghost fade.
The most extraordinary thing about it all was how simple it was just to carry on. There were meals to be prepared and eaten; dishes to be washed; clothes to be laundered, ironed, and put on and taken off; beds to be slept in and made and unmade. The prosaic needs of day-to-day living blunted all impact of the miraculous; it demanded that the glorious be relegated. And she knew that even if she were able to convince everyone involved that she had witnessed something remarkable, had undergone a transcendental and miraculous experience, reached and returned from another world, it almost seemed like it would not ever, and could not ever, truly matter.
As she lay inside the doughnut of the CT scanner, with the photoflash triggering, resetting, and triggering again, she thought of the charnas flower. She saw it all over again and she knew she was one bug in the group flower. Scattered by the wind of what happened, however astonishing it was, she really hadn’t traveled that far from the community to which she belonged. As the X-ray machine whirred and made another photograph of her brain she knew she had to take her place in the assembly of the flower. There was no other place to be.
OUT IN THE HOSPITAL parking lot Richie felt that his migraine had subsided. He was experiencing colored lights flickering behind his retina, tiny iridescent worms of radiance, but the pain had gone away. The attacks were irregular and unpredictable but they were getting worse. He thought maybe he was going to have to go in for a lifestyle change. No alcohol. No smoke. No sense of humor. Life unplugged.
If that was going to be the case, he decided, he might as well smoke while he still could. He opened his car door, stepped out, flicked his lighter, and torched up a cigarette. As he inhaled the tobacco he thought he saw a small shadow flit at the periphery of his vision, like that of a mouse running beneath a fridge. He peered hard between the cars parked in rows but saw nothing. His driver’s-side door was still open a fraction. He opened it wide and leaned back against the sill of his car, luxuriating in his smoking.
He was scheduled to see a specialist the following day to get the results of his own CT scan. He’d spent the morning reassuring Tara that it was nothing, routine; and so it was nothing. That is, the scan itself was nothing. The seeded anxiety about what might be found was, however, not nothing.
Being with Tara again had made him review
his life. The last twenty years had gone in a flicker. It compressed in the memory. Much of it had been lost to drinking or to being stoned, both of which were experiences that largely produced at best only smoky reminiscences. If the experiences had been good at the time—and he supposed they were—it would be nice to have strong recollection. But that didn’t seem to be the way it worked.
The music—the making of music and the performing of music—produced memories, many good, some bad, some difficult. But he knew for sure that he’d spent too much of that time living not in the present moment of creating or playing music but in the expectation or hope of some reward, some success. He had always been waiting for his life to start when that happened, when the recognition came. It had taken him twenty years to realize how utterly wrongheaded that was.
It was as if the twenty years didn’t amount to much, that he hadn’t actually been present for so much of his life. He wondered if he might be able to fix that now that Tara had come back. She had the gift of bringing him back to the present. He had played his guitar for her the previous evening and she had sat erect on his sofa and had been so focused on him, he knew that she was the audience he had wanted all along. Plus, he had a huge repertoire of songs—other people’s songs and his own songs—that he could play for her, and play well.
And then while he was playing she had taken his breath away when she showed him how to retune his guitar a different way.
