Limestone

by Fiona Farrell

  But Clare did not bunk. She went to school, liking its order and routine. School, university, an academic life, an existence made up of tiny particles which she has assembled about herself like a protective shell. And now it has cracked.

  Here she is, broken out, driving north towards Limerick. The sun is taking on that late-afternoon glow, casting its rich tint on signs for new housing estates with pictures of happy families on the hoardings and on factory walls and office blocks and hotels. Through city streets and out onto the motorway across the flat land bordering the Shannon estuary, among the cars and trucks and tour buses, nipping in and out of lanes in her little car, and then the road is narrowing suddenly, and there’s the bump and crawl of road works before they are off again, towards Ennis, Traditional Music Capital of Ireland Cead Mile Failte! Rows of semi-detached houses and a knot of streets around the centre and then she’s driving north as the sun lays down bars of gilded cloud and ribbons of crimson to the west. Feeling tired now, as the Toyota noses through soft round hills between green hedges and the defiles of tiny villages, houses and shops flat faced and eyes shutting on either side of a narrow street. And just as the day vanishes completely, she comes to Killinaboy. There is a sign on a gatepost at the side of the road.

  VACANCY.

  A tall house among trees.

  Lights in the windows.

  She pulls into the yard.

  VACANCY seems a good place to stop.

  VACANCY seems like a good place to start.

  Nine

  I want to tell you about a white stone reef. A white stone wall. And now I want to tell you about the bones. White bones. Stone bones.

  Osteopetrosis.

  The nested gene.

  There it was when I was born, nesting like a little bird on Chromosome 1. The tiny twisted thread of DNA that has delivered me my frail skeleton. Where ordinary bones have soft marrow to cushion the shocks of everyday living, I possess solid bone. Bones that could shatter if I fall, bones that could take months to knit once broken, bones that make me stiff sometimes, and ungainly, bones that show, I am told, a distinct marbling when exposed, rather than the even tint of normality. Bones that could start at any moment to grow unchecked, cell by bony cell, till they begin to press on nerves — to the eye, perhaps, or the ear — so that I must be vigilant for any alteration in sight or hearing. I cannot trust my body not to ambush me unawares. In the genetic scramble, that was my inheritance.

  I was like the baby who got the dud gift from the seventh fairy. I am like the woman who disobeyed divine injunction and was turned to a pillar of salt, or those dancers who ignored the Sabbath and were turned to stone circles by irritable fifth-century saints, or those men who, trapped mid-ocean on their waka, froze and became mountains. There are plenty of precedents if you look about.

  Maddie did not inherit stone bones. She fell from horse after horse, riding hard at fences with a reckless indifference to physical hurt that astonished me, even as a child. Brian did not inherit stone bones. Despite living rough for most of his adult life like some old ascetic with lousy hair and an unwashed body, Brian never suffered the most minor of fractures.

  Yet I am fortunate. That’s what the specialist said, when I was twenty-five and broke an ankle doing nothing more dramatic than tripping on a kerb. He arrived at my bedside along with a group of medical students. They stood about, examining fascinating me. I was, it seemed, of interest. The osteoclasts that should have restrained the growth of bone in the finely tuned mechanism of my ordinary human body had gone awry. My bone cells were multiplying, laying down strata, creating erratic forms beneath my skin in the dark unknown.

  I was in possession, it seemed, of a genetic disorder.

  A comparatively rare one, the specialist said, as if I should be pleased, as if I had acquired not a disorder but a tropical orchid that was particularly difficult to grow. At that distant moment when my father’s sperm flew to my mother’s egg I had a one in 500,000 chance of developing the condition. Slim odds, even by the standards of evolutionary bingo. I was a mild case, said the specialist, and I felt a slight sense of failure, as if I might be letting him down by not coming up with something more dramatic. But there you are: I had to do. I had missed out on stunted growth, skirted deformity, skidded past the possibilities of blindness and facial paralysis, though all of that was there inside me, tangled in the DNA like a knot in the knitting.

  And I could pass it on. I was a carrier. It sounded deeply sinister, as if I were some pathetic young woman seated on a plane with my intestines bulging with condoms stuffed with cocaine, any one of which could burst with disastrous consequences.

  The students in their new white coats, stethoscopes draped about their smooth necks, stood by my bed, looking down at genetic disorder. They seemed mildly impressed by my amazing breakable skeleton. Their scrutiny made me deeply uncomfortable. I felt like a bunch of abnormal cells exposed on a Petri dish. If I had been, I’d have been tossed out as not suitable for IVF implantation. Even as a nucleus, I would clearly have been unlikely to become a Nobel Prize winner or an Olympic athlete or a perfect specimen of human beauty. I was a genetic mess.

  Though the specialist called me ‘fortunate’. Fortunate that I could now choose not to give birth to deformity. Fortunate that, blessed with the knowledge of my true condition, I could look forward to a normal existence, so long as I observed a few minor precautions, particularly at times of hormonal disturbance: at menopause, for example, when my bones might become more susceptible to fracture. ‘Thank you, Miss Lacey,’ he said, and the group moved on to some other curiosity.

  I rang Phemie. My mother had died two years earlier. A quick and painful death of bowel cancer which she had endured with her customary stoicism. Phemie had the bungalow to herself once more, though she sometimes went up to the North Island to help her younger brother who was trying to manage a dairy farm with eight children and a wife who said she had that ME, though Phemie had her doubts. Bone idle, she said.

  ‘Oh no, dear,’ said Phemie, her fingers busy crocheting a christening gown for her brother’s youngest. ‘I don’t think anyone in our family has brittle bones. Certainly no one I can think of. Your Uncle Danny got turned down for the army, but that was on account of the flat feet. A lot of the Mulcahys have flat feet. And eye problems too, when we’re older. Grandma Mulcahy was as blind as a bat by the time she was eighty. But brittle bones? No. I’m sure I’d remember if anyone had brittle bones …’

  Which left Mick.

  Michael Francis Lacey.

  Our father.

  The feckless errant who had abandoned our mother to life in a small inquisitive town, to the humiliation of public speculation — for what man would walk out on his family if his wife was capable of keeping him happy? She wasted no time on gossip, kept her head high, her children tidy, and the home she shared by necessity with her saint of a sister immaculate. She went to Mass regularly but didn’t hang about chatting afterward. She had work to do, preparing club sandwiches for the lunchtime rush at the Copper Kettle. She did not go out in the evenings, for she could scarcely leave us on our own, not when her son was forever in the wars — though she did make an exception for The Sound of Music which she saw three times. Such a beautiful picture, such a lovely story of the nun who meets a count with lovely children and they all live happily ever after, once they’ve got away from those awful Nazis.

  We were her burden, her cross, her sorrow. Brian especially was a handful. He seemed to have no heed for consequence. He hurtled headlong down the hill on his bike and skidded on the gravel, scraping sheets of skin off both his legs. He leapt from our veranda roof.

  ‘Hey! Look at me!’ he yelled to Maddie and me. We were playing dress-ups in the garden. I was a bride and Maddie was the flower girl, and we were picking all the tulips for our bouquets. ‘LOOK! I can fly!’ He spread his arms, holding wide the edges of a towel he had tied round his neck. Standing against the blue sky, it was as though he had grown wings.

/>   ‘Don’t, Brian!’ we called. We had been well drilled in the dangers of climbing trees, opening the door to strangers and jumping from heights. But Brian was unimpressed. He had poked a nail into a power socket and now he could fly. He was going to fly to the top of the Powells’ ornamental oak. He was going to perch on the topmost branch in his Superman towel. He leapt. He crashed into a row of alternating pink and blue hyacinths, but survived unscathed.

  ‘Why on earth didn’t you girls stop him?’ said our mother, gathering him up from the mangled bed. ‘He could have broken his neck! If only your …’ She didn’t have to finish the sentence. We knew how it would go: if only our father was present or, better yet, not our actual father but a responsible decent dad who would tell Brian to cut it out, who would turn her son back into the child he had been, the prodigy who could read when he was only three.

  We had watched our brother spread his wings and for just a second, such was his confidence, we had believed he really might do it: fly to the top of a tree and perch there safely. As he got older, his eccentricities became more extreme and just as weirdly compelling. At school, he was difficult: the kind of child who refused to co-operate, who stood up when it suited him, and sat down when it suited him, and generally lived beyond the law. He ran away from class whenever punishment loomed, racing for the freedom of the street beyond the gates, and the dairy where he stole, with no apparent guilt, comics and Crunchie bars and, later, packets of Albanys. At high school, he took orders: the latest Rolling Stones album, tee shirts, a transistor radio. The other kids called him Brain Dead behind his back, while surreptitiously pocketing the proceeds.

  He was quick and fearless and when caught made no attempt whatever to conceal his stash. He was indifferent to the deterrent of being locked in a cell for half an hour to impress upon him the inevitable consequence of his ways. When they came to release him, he had scratched a tiny but recognisable portrait of the arresting officer on the cell wall among the whitewash and graffiti. He apologised freely and openly to the shop owners whose goods he had pocketed, said he would never do it again. He endured our mother’s embraces, considering her white face and tearful admonition with something like puzzlement. She was frantic. What would the neighbours think now? He was an indictment of her child-raising methods, though neither of her other children had given her a moment’s worry. He patted her awkwardly on the shoulder as if it was he who was comforting her, said he was sorry, and within the week he’d be off out the window at 2 a.m., wandering the night streets, sleeping on the slippery grey shingle beyond the breakwater to see the sun crash up, blood red, through bars of silver light from the wide flat nothing of the sea.

  ‘What can I do?’ wailed our mother, flinging up her hands in despair. Her son was out of control. And maybe the cause was genetic: he took after his father who acted on whims and bought a pony when there was barely enough money to put food on the table. Who took off when it suited him without a word of farewell. Perhaps her son had inherited this tendency to impulsiveness? It resided perhaps in some gene. Or maybe his behaviour was evidence of brain damage. The petty thefts, the restlessness were all a consequence of that moment when he was struck by Miss Conroy’s Austin. Which cause could also be attributed directly to Mick. The hopeless feckless father.

  So we had each received our gifts at birth, like the babies in fairy tales. I had received my bones. To Maddie, our father bequeathed the Lacey way with horses. To Brian, he gave restlessness. But he also gave him art.

  For Brian could draw effortlessly. He had inherited our father’s talent for translating reality to lines on a flat surface. At school, he created elaborate cartoons of monsters and wizards destroying teachers and cops, while the other kids stood at a respectful distance, impressed despite themselves by his unfettered imagination. I watched too, filled with envy. I loved drawing, but I lacked his wild vision. A drawing, a painting, could arouse in me a kind of ecstatic joy at its sheer beauty. I loved the virgins with their eyes like Jersey cows on the Columban calendar, and the swans rising from their misty lake above the dining-room table. My brother could make pictures like that. He could draw a picture of Mum sitting in her chair reading the evening paper and, in a few careless lines, have her translated perfectly to the blank space on the back of the electricity bill: the tiny bitter tug to the mouth, the slump of the shoulders.

  I was ‘good at art’. I got eighty-five in School Cert, whereas Brian bunked school so often that he failed completely. I left home at eighteen to go to Ilam, and returned infrequently, hating the too-tidy house, the claustrophobia of paper serviettes folded in triangles and grace before every meal, those pastel swans and sappy Nativities I had once thought so beautiful. I missed much of the detail of Brian’s adolescence, though I heard about its more spectacular moments: the attempt to dive from the railway bridge down by the harbour, for example. Brian did a lot of drugs. Everyone did, of course. It was the seventies. It went with long hair and the necessity to sit in paddocks in the pouring rain to listen to music, or sprawling speechless in bare flats revelling in the woozy beauty that seeped from cracks on stained ceilings. I was too timid to experiment much, always fearing what might be released from the crevices of that white cave that was my own skull, but Brian shrugged and said that was the whole point, to find out what was there. There was this whole other dimension, he said. He had become a tourist without map or guide, a hiker falling willingly through space into a visionary world.

  He lived behind an impenetrable wall of sound within his room, which he had painted not the conventional black favoured by moody young men the world over, but in a floor-to-ceiling comic book of writhing big-breasted women, fanged monsters, bloody horror and grunty machines. It was like Robert Crumb minus the laughs. Or Guernica minus the political point. It was like entering one of those little chapels you come upon in France or Italy or some other country with a long history of Catholic piety — one of those bare boxes ornamented with sixteenth-century frescoes, where the southern wall is all Nativity and singing angels, and the northern wall all miracles (blind men seeing, dead men walking, nature subverted by divine love), the eastern wall all starry triumph, and the western wall, the cold west wall, all terror. Slanderous tongues dragged out by devils with long pincers, lustful bodies boiled to soup bones in cauldrons, poor little frail human bodies snapped like kindling on rack or wheel. Brian’s room was like that, minus any reward for being good.

  We caught glimpses of it when he opened his door, which wasn’t often. He had screwed a bolt to the frame and kept it padlocked when he was out. Our contact with him was to thump on the wall when his thunderous heavy metal threatened to drown out Dynasty or Dallas in the sitting room next door. But just once, when I was home from university and frantic to leave already, to get away from this tight little home, he let me in. Perhaps because he sensed in me a kindred urge to run, he was kind.

  The curtains were drawn against another sunny Oamaru day. He switched on the light. The room exploded into colour and form.

  ‘Wow!’ I said, taking it all in. The woman emerging from his wardrobe clutching a dagger in her raised mailed fist. The massive insects swarming over his chest of drawers. The winged beasts that flew across his ceiling. It was amazing. It was repellent. It was overwhelming.

  I stood there in my new orange overalls, which I had deliberately spattered with paint so that it would be clear, absolutely clear, that I was an Art Student, at Art School, doing Art. But standing there I knew that it was a futile pose. I should forget any ambition to paint. That long-ago promise when I had transferred the landscape of castles and tiny roads to the footpath beyond our front fence had dissipated. I was better at looking at art. I was good at peering closely, at looking through the netting of convention and trying to understand. Whereas my brother was an artist: a painter in the classic romantic tradition: driven, marginal, a young man who stood with his feet poised either side of the fine black thread that separates beauty from terror, reason from delusion. That afternoon
in his feral room I saw for the first time what my brother had received as his inheritance.

  He left home not long after that day. He went on the road, living rough under bridges and in derelict buildings, carrying just a mangy sleeping bag and some minimal necessities. He hung out in city parks among the drunks and homeless, got moved on from temporary camps he’d set up on wild shingle beaches, his sleeping bag spread under African thorn, his coat strung over some branches to keep off the rain. I saw him sometimes, walking along a road or a city street, moving quickly as if something exciting were waiting for him just around the corner, or as if something breathed at his back in furious pursuit. Occasionally, he arrived at my door with a lop-eared collie dog on a bit of twine and a stained bag slung over one shoulder. I fed the dog, I fed him. He always said, ‘And don’t add any hot stuff. Curry or whatever.’ And I said, ‘You’re awfully picky for a hobo,’ and he laughed and ate rapidly, using his fingers, then perched cross-legged on the sofa to roll a joint. And I’d say, ‘For god’s sake have a bath, wouldn’t you like a bath?’ Not that he smelled, or at least not badly. Maybe I had just got used to it: his doggy smell. He laughed and said bathing was an affectation and that humans weren’t supposed to bath. Your skin and hair were designed to clean themselves.

  He never wore shoes, no matter how cold the weather, and that was always the first thing I noticed about him: his feet. The splayed toes, the calloused heels, the delicate tracery of the ankle bones under ragged cuffs. Because despite the dirt, despite the torn clothing, my brother was beautiful, with his shaggy beard and his wild halo of curly hair and his slender fingers, his thin elegant feet. Like one of those old Celtic saints who lived rough in caves, composing ecstatic hymns to birds and trees and mice. He had a loose free beauty. He was like a deer, or some wild animal roaming in an ancient unfettered world before fences locked them all in.