The following week, Kieran met Kirby at Ballinskelligs Pier. Gerry-Annie had been skeptical when he told her where he was going, and didn’t hold back expressing her concern. “And you complaining about going to the church,” she said, “suddenly wanting to make this pilgrimage! It doesn’t seem likely to me with you wanting to be on the roads day after day and that bicycle under you. You’ll have no bicycle out there on the holy island. And you’ll catch your death, or be blown right off the top of it into the waves, most likely – it’s happened before, you know.” Still, she packed some bread for him, a bit of ham, and several hunks of cheese. She also placed a candle in the bag, along with a small tin containing matches. He would not tell her about the race, though it had settled in his mind. It was only the girl, really, the thought of her waiting for him at its glorious conclusion, that made him want to do it. Or so he thought. He was still innocent of his own peculiar determination.
The day was not as fine as Kirby’s skies had predicted. When Kieran pointed this out, hoping for a reprieve, Kirby said that it was very fine indeed in relation to what he might encounter on the island. And because there was next to no wind, landing would be achievable without his much-loved boat being smashed to kindling on the rocks. While the boat heaved and dove with the swell on the journey across, Kirby identified sea birds, demanded that Kieran do the same, mildly berating him when he could not do so. How was it possible he did not even know a gannet when he saw one? The heads of seals appeared beside the boat, a staring crowd filled with curiosity. “No fish today,” Kirby called to them.
Then he turned to Kieran. “While you are there it would be good for your legs if you ran up and down the six hundred steps a dozen times a day. And don’t complain about it either, not even to yourself. Be grateful that you didn’t have to build the six hundred steps. Be grateful that those monks were such good engineers that you don’t even have to repair the six hundred steps these thirteen hundred years after they built them. And once you have achieved gratitude, it might be a very good idea if you thought about the other things you have to be grateful for, starting with your heart and breath. Blood and oxygen. And where does that blood and oxygen go? To your muscles, of course. Be grateful for the well-engineered steps whose existence and persistence are sending buckets of blood and windstorms full of oxygen to those muscles. And don’t forget your bones. The cage of your ribs that holds everything together, the long bones of your legs that carry your muscles around, and this bone” – Kirby knocked on his skull – “beautifully designed to take care of the most important muscle of them all. Use that muscle when you are running.” Kirby leaned forward and tapped Kieran’s forehead. “You’ll need it to pay attention when the steps are slippery with rain, and you’ll need it when it is not raining to reflect upon all the other things you have to be grateful for. That and the naming; I want you to be able to name everything, animate and inanimate, that you cycle past, and be grateful for most of it, and outraged at that which no sane man could be grateful for. What’s that bird, by the way? You don’t know of course. Well, you will when I am finished with you. For now you must be grateful, first and foremost, that you are alive at this time and with the proper age on you, with muscles, brain, bone, blood and oxygen, and the desire in you to win this race.”
The islands grew in size at the bow of the boat, rising and falling with the waves. The Great Skellig was a dark and intractable triangle. The Lesser Skellig was white with birds –gannets and puffins – so plentiful that the rocks were all but invisible. When Kieran turned his face toward the land, the green-and-brown seam of shoreline tilted back and forth. It was as if the mountains were weighing heavily on one side, then on the other. Then the Great Skellig, very large now, threw its shadow into the boat.
“Here, take the motor,” Kirby said. He staggered toward the bow of the boat then, still standing, legs apart, bent over to unspool a coil of rope. “Watch the colours deepen,” he commanded, throwing one arm up toward the island. He explained that as you drew nearer, the various shades of colour always intensified; purples and blues on dark days, deep greens and silvers when there was sun.
After Kirby had deposited him on the flat slab of rock that served as the island’s quay, and had floated away, Kieran stood for a long while watching the birds from the Lesser Skellig lift and fall in the air like white ash and listening to their otherworldly cries. His mother came to him, then but he found that he did not want to hear her when he was so close to the sea, so he began to climb the six hundred steps, easing into a trot, once he was certain of the stability of the rock beneath his shoes. By the time he reached the island’s Anchorite site, a chapel and a group of corbelled huts, at the summit, the wind had picked up and he feared it would begin to rain.
But although the day grew darker and colder, no rain fell. As Kirby had instructed, he spent the remainder of the day running up and down the steps, panting and sweating on the way up and terrified that he might lose his footing on the way down, wondering all the while what it was about the man, and about himself, that made him so willing to do what he said. At the end of one last climb he passed through the wall that surrounded the Anchorite site, trotted by the few standing stones of its graveyard, and collapsed with his back to a corbelled stone hut.
The wind came again, stronger than before, a living presence in the dusk, and full of sound. At one point, while Kieran was eating some of the food Annie had put in his satchel, he was certain he could hear the rocks above him rattling, and he thought the hut might collapse, killing him and making his burial site like those of the famine graves he had seen with Donal in the mountains. Finally, the weather became bad enough that he decided to crawl inside.
He could see nothing; the darkness was so total he felt that it might choke or drown him. Eventually, after touching the interior walls of the hut for assurance, he curled on his side and fell into a vacancy so complete he was in the same position when he awakened at dawn the following day.
He came to know almost everything on the island. Small pink flowers, the different kinds of droppings from various sea birds, the stones in the monks’ graveyard, particular paving stones, and the way the steps curved around outcroppings of rocks, the grass of the place called Christ’s Saddle where the donkey had been.
Late in the afternoon of the second day it began to rain, and great sheets of grey mist climbed the cliffs. He took shelter in the hut, shivering now with cold and knowing he could never achieve comfort. Then he remembered the candle and the tin of matches and he pulled them both from his pouch. The lit candle filled the conical interior with its glow and brought tears to his eyes. He had rarely been so moved. When he said the word flame out loud, there was emotion in his voice. He was grateful for this flame, and he was grateful for the sound of his own voice. When he blew the candle out and lay down on the flags with his eyes closed, he could see the flame’s after-image. He let the thoughts of the girl enter him then, without resistance. He was grateful for this as well.
A month or so later, in mid-October, after a particularly gruelling session with Michael Kirby, Kieran revisited the place where he had met Tadhg.
The days were not as long now. There was no longer light in the sky after supper. Kirby had insisted that before sunset Kieran run from the wall near where they met down to the pier and back – a distance of one mile – ten times, while making every effort not to even think about the bicycle. Down the hill, up the hill. “Forget all about the bicycle. Believe your mind and your body are the only things you’ve got,” Kirby shouted whenever Kieran was in view. “Because they are the only things you have got. There is no swiftly moving bicycle without your brain and heart driving it. Rid your mind of machinery! Take all those spokes and wheels and fenders to the mental midden and drop them in. When you finish I want you to describe the remaining wildflowers of the season growing in the hedgerows. Those hedgerows are going to be your neighbours in the race. You’d best get to know them in all seasons.”
Wildflowers.
Kieran wondered as he ran if the girl knew about such things, and concluded that she would of course. By the tenth lap he had the blossoms in his mind, one for each run. “A stack of dark pink horns!” he told Kirby, while gasping for air, “purple bells, something like white stars, a tall white thing with pins sticking out of it, small pink lanterns hanging down, a little fuzzy ball with sharp leaves, a clump of violet-coloured flowers on a long stem, four yellow petals above a feathery leaf, a yellow button with one white star around it, a rubbery thing with little yellow flowers.”
Years later, working with a pick axe to destroy some hedgerows in England so that a motorway could proceed a mile farther through farms and fields, he would remember the roads of southwest Kerry and wonder if they were still as alive as they had been, still filled with such abundance and disarray.
“Foxglove, harebell, lesser stitchwort, pipewort, St. Debeoc’s heath, sea holly, self-heal, tormentil, chamomile, wall pepper,” said Kirby. “You’ve spotted a lot of plants that heal, and that’s a good thing. I predict you are going to be needing a lot of healing one way or another.”
Kieran smiled at Kirby, mounted the bicycle, and wheeled away. Turning impulsively at the spot where the roads forked, he pedalled up toward the headland. It was a late afternoon of unusual calm: the lowness of the light was such that the edge of Hog’s Head opposite was crisp and bright, and the soft shapes of the islands were mirrored in the bay. Cill Rialaig, when he passed it, was alive with children running outdoors, and the ruined houses of the abandoned Old Cill Rialaig stood stark and vacant against a deep blue sky. Farther along, the reflection of the lowering sun shone in each of the school’s roadside windows. A man shearing a sheep in a field nearby waved to him. He returned the greeting, rounded a bend, and wheeled past the now open gate and the green road that rose behind it toward the place where he had seen the shape of Tadhg’s house in the fog, but he came to a halt once the cottage swung into view.
Everything about the structure was green; even the panes of cracked glass in the windows were covered with an emerald mould. The thatch of the roof was barely visible under the grass and weeds that grew in it among a wealth of tall deep-pink flowers that Kieran now knew were called foxgloves. Moss covered the fieldstone walls. The chimney had collapsed, and lay, a mass of soot-covered plaster and stone, in the west side of the bramble-filled yard beside the remains of a tin roof that must have at one time surmounted the shed or cow byre that occupied the corner of an adjacent field.
Kieran stood looking at the cottage, one foot on the ground, the other still resting on the left pedal of the bicycle. No one, he knew, had lived in this house for many years: the fact of absence was palpable even in the twisted rhododendron bush in the yard. The few blossoms that in spite of obvious neglect had struggled into bloom in May now hung sodden and inert. No woman had picked them to place in a jar near the hearth. No woman and no man had moved in or out of this broken door for years.
It was as if, at this moment, the present and eternity came to him simultaneously and the strangeness of this shook him. He couldn’t find it in himself to approach the cottage, but neither could he turn away. His limbs felt heavy, immovable, and for a moment or two he believed he might abide in this place forever, that he had been abandoned by time. Then a light breeze feathered the grass between him and the cottage and broke apart the perfect reflection of the headland far below in the bay, and he knew why he had come to Tadhg’s door.
He had had a question. The day of the gathering. What did it look like exactly, and how long did it last? Was it a moment or a season … perhaps a lifetime? He looked below him across the fields and down to the sea. There were waves approaching the rocks. From this distance they appeared to be so gentle, moving one after the other in a leisurely fashion toward the cliffs, where they broke apart throwing plumes of graceful spray, like the white silent fireworks he had seen at Puck Fair. Behind him, where he knew the green road out to the end began its ascent, he heard the creak of the gate he had opened moving back and forth in the air.
HALLS OF DEPARTURE
Niall had walked into her life from the road, looking for that same telephone that would become so central to what did or did not happen between them. She had seen him through the window, squatting beside a troublesome wheel, his bicycle lying like a large wounded bird on the gravel. She had seen him squint upwards to see if there was a telephone wire heading from a pole to her house. He was not the first traveller to spot that wire, telephones being so rare in the parish. After he had righted the bicycle and leaned it against the wall beside her gate, he had walked across her grass and she heard his knock. “Sorry to trouble you,” he said when she opened the door. She would always remember that line: Sorry to trouble you. “I’m from Cahersiveen,” he added. He nodded in the direction of the bicycle. “I’m afraid I need to make a call.”
“No trouble,” she said, holding the door open and moving to one side so that he could come in.
His wife, he reported after the call, would come to collect him in a Vauxhall not unlike the one that sat in her own lane, but blue not grey. While they waited for her to arrive, there was some awkward talk between them, mostly about the sad condition of the road. In the midst of this, he said he would go outside to remove the back wheel so the bicycle could be put in the boot of the car. Then moving toward the door, he spotted the sailor’s valentine and had asked about it. She explained Teddy’s grandparents and, conjecturing – she supposed by her accent – that she was on holiday, he’d asked if her husband was out enjoying the mountains or maybe fishing.
“No,” she said, embarrassed. “He’s dead. He died some time ago.”
“Oh,” he had said, “sorry.”
“Yes,” she had said. “I am as well.”
“I suppose,” he’d said, “it would be better for me to be outside where my wife can see me.”
She agreed, though she knew it would take his wife at least another twenty minutes to arrive.
He had stood in the yard, waiting, sometimes walking up to the road and back again, while Tam intermittently watched him through the window. At one point she saw him bend over to yank a weed from the garden. Now and then he examined the sky above the mountains, as if he thought he might be rescued by airplane. The sun came out and he removed his corduroy jacket, hanging it on the branch of her one hawthorn tree. She had thought him a slim man but realized now that his upper body was strongly built, his shoulders thick with the muscles of an athlete. There was tenseness as well in his posture, which was that of a man about to engage in a series of actions involving tests of strength or skill. Or so Tam thought, watching him pace, his gait measured and firm.
When the blue Vauxhall stopped on the road beside her lane, he turned back to the window and waved, mouthing the words thank you, his hand surprisingly large and white at the end of the dark woollen sleeve of the jumper he had been wearing under the jacket. Then he had turned his attention to the bicycle and the boot. Tam could see the grey silhouette of a figure at the wheel, the shape of the hair gathered at the back of the head, but nothing more.
It wasn’t until nearly nightfall that she noticed the jacket moving in the wind at the end of the branch and she stepped outside to collect it. The weather had changed; there would be rain, and the wind would most likely increase.
Back in the house she began a number of chores. The ashes needed to be cleaned from the hearth and then taken outside and scattered in the wind, and a new load of turf needed to be brought in from the shed. Teddy’s grandmother’s two brass candlesticks had to be attended to, the wax removed and their surfaces polished. After this, several letters needed to be finished, one in particular to her mother. This was a monthly duty, in which she referred to changes in the landscape or weather, and described one of the few dinner parties held by the remaining Anglo-Irish in the vicinity in order to make her parents believe, not entirely incorrectly, that she had some kind of a life there.
While she was ironing two cotton blouses
she had removed from the line out back, she decided he would be back for the jacket soon. He would cycle down the road, then dismount, and approach her door as if the ordinary events of the afternoon had been a rehearsal for something grand and solemn. She registered the oddness of such notions but was aware also of an ominous ability to wait being born in her. Not patience, exactly, there would be too much difficulty for that, but the kind of waiting that would be chronic and painful and yet without any real solidity to back it up. She hung the jacket on a hook behind her front door, and then, before she knew what she was doing, she was running her hands up and down the coarse woollen fabric of its two sleeves.
The Night Stages Page 19
