Luke held me tenderly, demanding nothing, allowing me the option of sleep. I understood why I had mistrusted him and pretended that our relationship was purely for sex. Those memories of Dublin had impeded so much in my life, causing me to mistrust men or to try and use them to get even. They had locked me inside a solitary confinement where I was afraid to allow anyone to get close to me again. Not my mother, even when she lay dying, not my grandparents or the few real friends I’d ever made. But Luke was right, we did nothing for one reason only. I had always known I would return to confront these demons. Now I wasn’t sure if being here had helped heal those memories or if it was the effects of the E, but this emotion I was finally allowing myself to experience felt like love. I knew I could tell Luke things I had never been able to tell anyone. I didn’t say a word though. It was enough that I had finally found somebody I could trust, if and when I was ready.
I nestled against Luke and planted a deep love bite on his neck which he would be unable to hide at the graveside with his family. He nuzzled back against me with his lips suspended inches from mine, forcing me to take the initiative. He knew me well enough to know that the night wouldn’t stop at this.
THIRTEEN
SOMETHING TROUBLED my sleep, a foreboding of danger. The dream I was wrapped within held me for a moment longer, then dissolved into oblivion. I didn’t want to wake but an instinct for survival forced me to. Light filtered under the door to sketch the outline of the hotel bedroom. I heard breathing beside me and listened to its unfamiliar rise and fall. I tried to make out the time on the clock, but it took an eternity for its luminous hands to merge into focus. Five past six. I’d only had an hour’s sleep. Luke’s breathing changed, as if sensing a difference in the room. He seemed asleep still but like a dog on guard with one ear alert.
Our relationship had shifted and everything felt strange and new. There would be difficult commitments to make in London, but this wasn’t what had woken me. I turned over, yet my unease wouldn’t go away. I thought back through the night, stage by stage, until I remembered and felt stupid. I almost didn’t tell Luke, but fear kept me twisting until he woke, suddenly and without fuss, his voice eerily calm in the dark.
‘What’s wrong?’ he whispered.
‘It’s my jacket. I left it in the playhouse at the end of Christy’s garden.’
‘I’ll get it for you tomorrow evening.’
‘That may be too late.’
I couldn’t distinguish his features, just the shape of him sitting up.
‘My contraceptive pill’s in the inside pocket,’ I explained. ‘I take it after I wake every morning.’
Luke took a deep breath and reached for his shirt. I put out a hand to touch his shoulder. This was our first night together, the most intimate moments we had ever known. I didn’t want it to end so abruptly.
‘Maybe it will be all right,’ I said.
‘Having one family is complex enough,’ Luke replied grimly.
‘There’s the morning-after pill.’
‘Even stronger hormones to screw you up. We’ll sort it out now and take no chances.’ He switched on the bedside light. His eyes were ringed with tiredness, the flesh below them wrinkled. He was already half dressed. ‘You sleep on. I’ll be back in forty minutes, but I’ll have to leave you then.’
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘I want to go with you.’
We went downstairs together. The night porter had disappeared. On the street outside our footsteps crunched on wafer-thin ice. The sky was moonless. I looked at Luke under the amber streetlights, and remembered the story he had told me about why he married so young. Shortly before his twenty-first birthday he was skimming through a trolley of books in a library when a half-used card of contraceptive pills tumbled out. Luke had never seen the pill before as it was illegal in Ireland then. He had stared at the cycle of days on the back and pocketed the card, not understanding how they worked or wanting to lose face by asking anyone. The following Saturday he told the girl he had started dating that, if she swallowed the pill marked for Saturday, it would be safe to have sex that night. Five weeks later, on the night of her debs, Carmel told him she was pregnant. They were married on her eighteenth birthday and booked a cheap package holiday to Spain for their honeymoon. It was their first time flying and Carmel miscarried on the plane. Luke’s whole life could be traced back to that library book. It was no wonder I never saw him read.
We passed a church set back behind bushes and then a convent wall which made our footsteps echo. Red-brick nineteenth-century houses across the street had the look of flats and, ahead of us, the occasional truck sped past as we reached the airport road. At least Luke’s fate had been less painful than Christy’s, I thought, remembering Luke’s tale about how Christine was conceived in agony in the pigeon-loft in the Duggan garden. Margaret had burst into their kitchen in tears at seventeen, holding up her jeans and blurting out to the entire family: ‘Christy’s mickey’s after getting stuck in my zip and I’m going to get pregnant.’ I wondered at what sort of country my mother had visited and how two brothers could have known so little about the world.
A grass verge led down to the airport road. There was a line of old trees with plastic refuse sacks and boxes left out for collection. I glanced at the cardboard boxes, imagining I was going to find children sleeping there. Luke saw me shiver and put his arm around me.
‘Are you okay?’
I nodded, but I wasn’t. A taxi passed. Luke put his hand out but it went by. I saw a pair of Christmas revellers in the back, curled around each other. Luke cursed and watched the sporadic traffic pass in both directions. I leaned against the railing. I knew Dublin at this hour. It was this time which stood out most from the four days I’d spent among that gang of begging children when I was eleven.
Our nights had been spent sleeping in laneways and abandoned cars. Not that I actually slept, or at least not for more than a few minutes here and there when I may have blacked out. I didn’t sleep, mostly I didn’t speak and I would have eaten nothing if the traveller boy known as Martin hadn’t sat beside me until I learnt not to be afraid, coaxing and sometimes even feeding me by hand. I could still smell the plastic bag he held to my face. I had inhaled not just the sour fumes of glue, but the sticky odour of his unwashed breath. At first I had gagged, then I breathed the glue in again and again, as though I could vanish into that white winter-palace where everything became distant and numb.
Those glue fumes had made the nettles in a derelict plot appear as fantastical as a tropical forest on that first morning when I had lain with my head among rubble, staring at a fireplace implausibly suspended in the exposed chimney breast of the buttressed building next door. I was hardly aware of Martin’s vicious fight with some older boy while the others screamed and circled them. If he had lost and they had abandoned me, I would have lain there until I was found or some worse fate befell me. But, after the fight, the others grudgingly accepted me. I was now Martin’s woman, although he never touched me, beyond sometimes taking my hand at night. Perhaps he had recognised that we shared the same tinker blood.
I heard Luke’s voice call me back into the present and shivered, looking up to see that he had flagged down an ancient-looking taxi. The old driver did a slow U-turn and Luke held the door open for me, before giving him instructions for Howth. The driver looked seventy if he was a day. He had a countryman’s peaked cap and spoke with an accent I couldn’t always follow.
He pointed out a house where he had been stopped by a Corkman, who asked him to help carry out the contents of his flat and leave him on the Nass dual carriageway where his brother was due to pick him up. The Corkman not only paid in full but gave him a bottle of whiskey for his help. Two days later police had questioned the driver about his cab being spotted at the scene of a burglary where someone’s flat was cleaned out. The driver laughed, saying that the Corkman had been a con-man all along.
Luke told a story in return, about two brothers he’d known years ago in Dublin. On
e would go into pubs in the flat-land off the South Circular Road to sell somebody a colour television for almost nothing. He would even deliver it to the person’s flat. The next night the other brother would break in and rob the television back. The flat dweller would be unable to report the robbery without confessing to having knowingly bought a stolen television. The brothers had sold that television twenty times, on one occasion even twice on the same night.
‘Dublin’s a city of rogues and chancers right enough,’ the driver said, nodding. I knew Luke was describing Christy and himself. He mentioned somebody else he’d known, back in the 1970s, who sought out dumb-looking tourists in dodgy pubs to sell them lumps of beef stock cubes as dope. If the tourists said they already had dope, he would flash an official badge, press them against the wall and claim to be from the drug squad. He always let them off with a warning and confiscation. Luke laughed, saying the badge had been a folded dog licence printed in Irish.
I noticed how Luke’s voice changed when he spoke with other Irish people. Were these stories of his past being told to entertain the driver or for my benefit? There seemed no end to these myriad Lukes, each one embellished differently when you turned him in the light. Once this trait had seemed threatening, now it felt endearingly childish. The cool dude about town was actually so clueless he didn’t even understand how contraceptive pills worked. Tonight was the first time I felt I really knew Luke. Now almost immediately he was trying to blur that honesty with other delinquent versions of himself.
The taxi reached the coast road. Lights of oil terminals lit up the port buildings on the far side of the bay. I looked out and recognised the long wooden bridge leading on to the wild island there and I almost grabbed Luke’s shoulder. He glanced at me, then followed the arches out across the dark expanse of mud and water. I wound down the window and breathed in the icy air.
Coldness was the sensation I remembered most from those days among the children. A numbness within me and a coldness without. The only time I recalled being warm was the night we set fire to the gorse on that island. It had been my turn to scare them. After remaining silent for two days I’d begun screaming along with them as they ran about, plucking up the burning pieces of firelighter with their bare fingers to fling into the bushes. But my scream was different. It wouldn’t stop. It was as all pervasive as Martin’s bag of glue, a high-pitched wail I tried to vanish inside. I knew if someone had held up a glass it would shatter with the noise. My throat ached, my lungs grew sore, but the scream wouldn’t stop. The children ceased charging about and stood, clasping the cider and food they had bought with the goods Martin had taught me how to steal. They watched in silence as I raced between the spreading fires, spinning dizzily and screeching as though my clothes had caught fire and my body was a single mass of blistering flame.
I shivered in the taxi now at that memory. I wound up the window and pressed my palms against the glass. Luke was watching me, just like the children had that night. I heard that scream in my head again and remembered the sensation of being unable to stop it. But I hadn’t wanted to stop. I had to keep screaming to expel the pain. Finally Martin had caught me. As soon as his hands grabbed my wrists I clawed at him, trying to bite. He was the strongest in the gang, yet I knocked him over so that his hair almost caught fire. But I wasn’t seeing Martin as I fought, I saw that face from the laneway, the same face I would later see in dozens of men. I don’t know how Martin got me on to his back. I just remember him staggering through the sand dunes as I kicked and struggled. He fell to his knees once but stumbled on across the strand towards the waves. The water hit me as I fell, shockingly cold and cutting into my bones. I thought I was going to drown, then I realised that Martin was trying to bring me back to my senses.
My screaming had stopped and tears finally came. I looked up and saw how scared Martin was. There were sirens on the causeway as the flames alerted the police and fire service. Martin managed to lift me up in his arms. I was soaked but it wasn’t the cold which made me shiver. The others came running, shadows emerging from the billowing smoke and crackling gorse. It was time to flee, like the terrified rabbits and the fox who crossed our path. We raced to the far end of the island where the girls took possession of me, banishing Martin and the boys. They stripped me to the skin, each one proffering an item of their own ragged clothing to keep me warm. Finally I looked like them in every way. Martin returned and I tried to drink cider but it made my stomach heave. I put the bag of glue to my nostrils instead. I no longer cared if my mother was searching for me. We had come to Ireland to find my tinker father. She had failed. Yet here I was among grass and sand dunes, watching the lights of fire-fighters at work, accepted into the very heart of his tribe.
I didn’t speak between the island and Howth. Luke’s stories had dried up and the driver just drove, humming tiredly to himself. A car had crashed into a cemetery wall at the start of the climb up Howth Head. I could see blood and glass on the roadway. We turned left and halfway up Luke instructed the driver to stop alongside the high wall bordering the cul-de-sac where Christy had lived. The driver glanced back, slightly wary of the location.
‘The girl left her jacket in a garden here at a Christmas party,’ Luke told him. ‘I don’t want to disturb anyone in the house at this hour.’
‘You wouldn’t be going to ask me to meet your brother out along the Nass dual carriageway?’ the driver joked, but his eyes checked Luke out. I wondered how often he had been robbed. He seemed too old to be working at this hour.
‘I’m not.’ Luke got out, then leaned back into the cab. ‘And you needn’t think she’s the bottle of whiskey, either.’
Luke moved along the wall, feeling the bricks as if picking his exact spot. He stepped back and then sprang up to get a grip on the top. He dropped into the garden with surprising speed. The driver watched.
‘He’s quick on his pins, your Da,’ he said.
I held the man’s inquisitive gaze in the mirror.
‘He’s pretty neat in the sack as well,’ I replied.
The driver looked away and smiled, beaten at his own game. He lit a cigarette and offered me one. We smoked in silence for a few moments, but Luke was surprisingly long. I sensed the man’s unease and asked him about being a taxi driver. He had done it for forty years, he said. People saw the queues at Christmas and thought they were cleaning up, but it didn’t matter if a dozen fares were waiting, when you could only take one at a time. Still Christmas was the one time his wife could expect him to knuckle down and arrive home at dawn.
‘What would you do the rest of the year?’ I glanced back at the deserted road, wishing Luke would re-appear.
The old man laughed. ‘Not much at my age.’ I didn’t think he was going to say any more, but then he muttered that when business was slow he found it hard to sit for hours in some rank. His wife wasn’t always happy about his travels, but she accepted that music was in his blood.
I couldn’t follow what he said. A car emerged from the estate, testing the road for ice. I asked what music he played and he said he kept an old set of uilleann pipes in the boot. He seemed surprised that someone with my accent knew what they were. When I quizzed him he became reticent. Yet I sensed a fierce pride and knew he was nobody’s fool. I remembered finding a book of photographs of Ireland in Harrow library. There was one shot of an old musician at a horse fair, his nicotined fingers playing a cheap tin whistle while his eyes stared with mistrust towards the camera. I’d spent hours staring at it, convinced – though I knew they couldn’t be – that it was my father’s features I was looking at. Now I gazed at the taxi driver in the same way, equally aware he wasn’t my father, but fixated by a world I had to coax him to talk about.
His children were raised now, he said. One lad worked in a nuclear plant in Canada and the other was a doctor in Edinburgh. Times had often been hard, but his house in Whitehall was long paid for and his wife had her friends in the ladies club. On summer nights thirty years ago a dozen musicians often gather
ed to play in his home with carpets rolled back for set dancing. But music sessions had spread out into pubs now, not like the old days when Dubliners mocked the music. He remembered his sons being bullied on their way home from the Pipers club and an old neighbour who’d served in the British army shouting at them to show him their green tongues. He still drove the taxi to stay out of his wife’s way, but when warm weather came, she sometimes knew not to expect him home for three or four days. When his sons were young, she had fought with him over his wandering, but, ironically, now when he had the time he often hadn’t the heart for the long drive to Clare.
I glanced out the window but there was still no sign of Luke. I wondered if McGann could be hanging around. The driver was more relaxed and even clicked the meter off. He told me he still wandered off a few times every year. He might deliver a fare to one of the expensive new hotels in Kildare and instead of turning back he would take the sign off the roof and drive on. His friends were older and many were dead. Everything about their lives had changed. Labouring men who had played the bones in his kitchen now often found themselves blinking in the footlights of concert halls in Vienna.
If you weren’t careful down the country you’d find a dozen Germans and Danes with video cameras gathered at your feet, he said. Not that he’d hear a word against the young visitors. They were enthusiastic, amazingly knowledgeable and, God bless their innocence, they believed any story you told them. If it had been left to Irish people alone the music might have died out, although a hard core always existed among certain families, passing tunes on. But now, at times, those men he played with felt like hunted animals. Although they welcomed strangers they often wanted to be left alone. People flocked to pubs in Milltown Malbay and other isolated villages hoping to hear them, but sometimes a quiet word was needed to discover the location of the real session in someone’s kitchen.
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