by Allyson Bird
This smooth journey in clear weather seemed to want to prove everything had changed.
“What’s he like now?” The words came out gruffly, he hated that he even wondered if the old bastard had decided to join the human race. He wanted to squash that tiny spark in him that yearned for some Hollywood breakthrough, which would launch a new relationship.
“Older.”
He cast a withering glare at her, and noticed she was chewing the ends of her hair, an old childhood habit that always made him feel vaguely ill. Familiar words of censure rose up. He refused to say them. He was the big brother, but she was a grown woman. It was hard to unlearn rote expressions, but she had demanded freedom from his stewardship years ago, and he was determined to honour that even when he suspected she was incapable of responsibility.
“Calm down! He’s … shrunk. Remember how big he was when we were kids? He seemed to fill every room he was in. Now, he’s smaller, white hair, and walks with a cane.” She paused, and narrowed her eyes. “He’s harmless.”
“Pity he wasn’t harmless when I was eleven.” Oisín clenched his jaw.
Orla reached out and stroked his arm. He wanted to bat it, and her sympathy, away, but didn’t.
“What prompted you to visit?”
“Lots of things. I’ve got a new part, and it’s a bit gruelling.” She hugged herself as if she was suddenly cold. “I needed to remember something … comforting. I wanted to go back to the cottage, and to do that I had to see him.”
Oisín remained silent under the onslaught of too many conflicting emotions.
She glanced over and judged his mood, before she continued. “After all, he’s our only link to …” Oisín guessed she wanted to say Dad, but was afraid that word would be too much for him on this reluctant journey. “… our childhood.”
“What there was of it after Mam died,” he said, barely able to get the words through his gritted teeth.
She loosened a long sigh. “But before that we had good times in the cottage with her. We were happy.”
He nodded, curt. “Maybe. I was older. I noticed things you didn’t after Dad left.”
Orla removed her hand from his arm, and lifted a lock of her hair back up to her mouth.
He scowled, and she noticed. She dropped it, guilty.
She laughed suddenly, grinning. “Do you remember the plays we used to put on for Mam in the evenings? And the mad outfits she used to make for us from the likes of sheets, plastic bags, and egg cartons? She was a genius with a pair of scissors, cloth, and thread.”
“I remember we couldn’t afford a telly, and she had to distract two kids from hunger and a cold house.”
She turned her face to the window, and he barely heard her mutter, “… his cloak, shredded, flapped around his vile visage…”
Oisín’s foot hit the brake, instinctively.
“What?” His voice too loud.
Her face turned to him, dispassionate. “You remember. The play.”
A fragment, shrouded, flitted across his mind, and associated with it: paralysing dread.
An exit loomed, and he wrenched the steering wheel towards it.
Orla clutched at the door handle, and the car in the lane beside them blared a warning.
He was still breathing hard when they pulled up to the petrol station.
“We’re losing the light,” she said, munching on a chip. Across the table Oisín nursed a large cup of coffee, and stared at it as if expecting answers to appear in its surface.
“Good. You’re not the one driving into the sunset.”
Nearby, inside a play area constructed around a large, custard-yellow plastic castle, a child wailed.
“Once we’re off the straight roads it’s a twisting drive. Are you sure you remember the way, in the dark?”
The cry escalated into a hysterical shriek. Oisín glanced over at the ugly structure, wondering where the parents were hiding. Huddled over tea and pastry, perhaps, wilfully ignoring their infant’s tantrum, and preparing for the final push home in a car full of squabbling siblings.
The pitch of the child’s scream notched upwards. “I’m the king!” he screeched, “Obey me!”
“Where the fuck are the parents?” Oisín wondered, frowning. The tables closest to the stronghold were deserted. He looked around, trying to spot the guilty party.
“Maybe they’re tired,” Orla replied staring out of the station’s window across the fields at the setting sun. “Maybe they don’t care.”
The noise increased to a pitch Oisín did not think could be made by any human throat. He stood up, hands clamped over his ears. Orla didn’t pay attention. Outside the sun dipped under the horizon.
“The light fades,” she whispered.
In an instant, beyond the glass, darkness reigned.
The gaudy squat castle shuddered.
The eerie scream halted.
The ensuing silence held the ponderous weight of awful expectation.
Smiling, Orla drew a sign upon the glass, and cracks cobwebbed across its surface instantly.
“No!” he yelled, but the glass exploded inwards and the night invaded the room.
He dived to the floor, arms covering his face, but not before he saw a phosphorus glow spring up around the castle.
Then, in the booming voice of a victor: “Prepare for his return.”
Oisín jolted awake, heart juddering, as Orla grabbed at the steering wheel. Before them the twin headlights of the car revealed a grassy verge. The car bounced over the soft ground. He pulled the wheel, hard, and the car skidded badly in mud, until it regained the road. He spotted a space by a gate to a field, and pulled in, gasping.
Orla panted beside him.
“Shit! I’m so sorry!” memory rushed back. They had left the station an hour ago and had been driving down quieter country roads ever since. “Micro sleep.”
She punched him in the upper arm. “You nearly killed us!”
He turned to look at her face, so fearful, so precious to him.
“You’ve all I’ve left,” he blurted out.
Orla placed her hand upon his cheek. It felt like a benediction. “I’m here. We’re okay. Can you stay awake or do you want me to take over?”
He kicked open the car door and staggered upright. The wind ripped at his coat, and water from the hedgerow dashed into his face. His mind was so clear it felt cruel.
Orla sprang out of the car and came around so she stood in the wash of the lights, a spectral being.
He reached in and turned off the headlights. The night sky of his youth, awash with stars, crashed upon him. He grabbed the car door, dizzy from the majestic immensity.
“Were there so many back then?” he murmured.
Orla removed the keys from his frozen hand. “I’ll drive the rest of the way.”
He nodded, stumbled around the vehicle, and fell into the passenger seat, glad to be hidden from the dispassionate heavens.
He woke again, in darkness. His neck ached. Orla was gone. His first sight through the windscreen: the square outline of the white farmhouse gleaming in the dull starlight. Their hated home after their mother passed away. His stomach knotted in response.
No lights graced any of the windows.
A cold welcome, he thought, followed by, same as usual.
Oisín climbed out of the car in discordant movements, his body protesting his cramped, interrupted sleep. The mixed-up clean and nasty smells of a farm assaulted him and he wrinkled his nose in protest. The gravel crunched under his leather brogues, and he imagined the first comment his grandfather would make would be on how inappropriate they were. He stood before the blue door and braced himself for contempt and indifference, while reminding himself of his achievements and successes.
The door opened easily, and the stillness of an empty house greeted him. The long, dark hallway disappeared into a void where the kitchen lay.
“Hello?” he said, not too loud. “Orla? Fintan?” He’d begun calling his grandfather b
y his first name as an act of rebellion when Oisín was thirteen.
He didn’t want to enter the house. It was the repository of bad memories and old hurts, and he felt they would consume him if he stepped over the threshold.
Instead, he leaned in and flipped the light switch just inside the door: nothing. Oisín turned it on and off several times before stopping. Now, he could smell a faint odour of mildew, and sense the coolness unique to a deserted home.
He turned away, shuffling his feet against the invasive chill, and buttoned his overcoat tight to his chin. As he moved he noticed the spark of light gleam between the hawthorn trees, up the boreen which lead to the cottage he had lived in for two years with his mother and Orla after their dad disappeared.
Oisín fished his mobile phone out of his pocket, and turned the flashlight app on. The bright LED was a tiny point of ease against the immensity of the blackness surrounding him. He gazed up at the sky bursting with stars, and wondered if each of the minute lights above him marked another being stumbling about, lost in a dreadful place.
We are alone, together, he thought, and there was a doubling effect. As if he had heard that phrase before, but said in his father’s rich timbre.
A faint memory coalesced: his father in a chair tipped back in front of the fire at the cottage, reading through lines for his last play. Orla stood beside him, barely eight, and speaking the part of the opposite character. Then: his mother, raging, yanking the pages from Orla’s hand.
“She’s not speaking these unholy words, Miles!” she’d reprimanded.
And the mocking laughter in response. “You’re never too young for great art, Ellie. And this will be my masterpiece. They will remember me forever after this is staged.”
Bitterness blotted out the recollection, and Oisín hunched his shoulders against his father’s egotism. Miles had always chased fame, and despite his talent—which everyone acknowledged, even critics who loved to disparage him—he had never found the right role, the right director, or the right theatre big enough to house it. There were always excuses and reasons for his failures. Until he abandoned them outright after his last play was stopped during its debut performance.
Oisín moved quickly along the grassy path, framed by rough, limestone walls, which led to the cottage. He was angry. Baffled at being left alone by his sister after taking this long voyage with her into their turbulent past, and most furious at himself for letting the shadows in his mind roil up so many emotions. He had never understood why Orla threw herself into a profession that required her to tap into the raw root of life’s experiences, again and again. Sure, the results were luminous. Orla inhabited her characters on the screen in an exhilarating fashion, but he had also witnessed the cost she paid for her mercurial shape-shifting. He preferred to keep his emotional life under wraps, and guarded.
As he rounded the final bend before the whitewashed building his steps slowed. He had taken this road so many times before, every bump remained familiar. He wasn’t sure if he knew the street he lived on for the past five years as well as this ramshackle path to his childhood home.
Welcoming light blazed from the windows. He’d expected the small house to be almost a ruin, since it had been dilapidated when they’d been forced to live there after being chased out of Dublin by debt collectors. Instead, it appeared renovated.
He approached the door, painted a bright red, and the top half of it swung open in the traditional style of meeting a passer-by.
“Surprise!” Orla said, leaning on the bottom half of the door. Inside Oisín could see a sympathetic restoration that harkened to the older period of the house while adding modern amenities.
“What on earth…?”
Orla unfastened the bottom half of the door and swung it open to admit him. Oisín walked in, confused. Before he knew it Orla had removed his coat and put a crystal tumbler containing whiskey into his hand.
With a cheeky grin she raised her glass and clinked it against his. “Oh yes, the irresponsible sister has grown up a little.”
“You…” he glanced around. Traces of the past lingered, but the overall impression was of a new, tasteful history.
He sat down in a comfortable armchair by the crackling fire and downed a gulp of alcohol. Its fiery path down his throat woke him up.
“I’ve made money you know. Enough to pay someone to tidy this place up. A nice retreat for when I need to remember who I am.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Where’s the drama in that Oisín?” She laughed, and sipped the whiskey. “If you could just see your face… I’m taking notes of that expression!”
He frowned, an unpleasant realisation surfacing. “Were you putting on a pretence in Dublin, to lure me down here for your big reveal?”
She stood up to stand by the fireplace, and drank a bit more, but he noticed the irritated swish in her step. Perhaps that was part of the spectacle. A weariness settled on him, mostly borne from the relief that the ugly scenes he’d anticipated had not materialised.
“So, where’s Fintan?”
She arched an eyebrow. “I didn’t think you’d be eager to meet the old devil again.”
“Not exactly, but what’s been going on here?”
“Fintan has been in a nursing home for a year. Great Aunt Nora contacted me. Everyone knew you didn’t want to be bothered about him.”
Protests crowded into Oisín’s mouth, but he choked them back. He’d not contacted his grandfather in ten years, after all. What concerned him most was this disclosure exposed the gulf that lay between him and Orla. So much of daily life excluded from each other. All her travel, and his investment in his job. Their different social circles, and her growing fame. Their connections now seemed more fragile than he’d imagined.
A sadness at the rupture between them overwhelmed him. Once, they had been each other’s only shelter against the world. He missed that conviction in her love.
“You’re right,” he admitted, defeated. “Is he okay?”
“Better cared for than we were by him.” She winked and drained her glass.
Her glibness rankled, and yet he would have said the same an hour ago. The map of his universe had been altered, and it felt like he was scrambling to chart his bearings.
“I have another story to tell tonight,” she declaimed, in a theatrical fashion. Dad had called it the Getting the Punters’ Attention voice, and it was eerily reminiscent of him.
“I think I’ve had enough surprises for--”
She flicked a switch and the main lights extinguished, leaving a couple of candles and the fire as the only source of illumination. “I’ve engaged with a new collaboration. One of the most challenging of my career.”
Oisín withheld his questions. He was now cast in the role of audience, not interrogator. If he wrecked the moment he would fuel resentment for years. It had been one of his earliest lessons: the show takes priority. He settled back and prepared for Orla’s announcement of her next grand adventure.
“I’ve been approached by my first teacher, to take on a part in a play that has been banned from live performance in every country for years. We’ve assembled a cast in secret, conducted rehearsals, and we’ll live-broadcast it over the Internet from here, in the outer lands crushed against the Atlantic Ocean.” The shadows in the room flickered with the candlelight. Outside the wind rose. Oisín shifted, and glanced behind him, but there was only darkness. Yet, he felt as if he was part of a gathering witnessing a grave event.
Surely, he heard whispering?
Orla continued. “Soon everyone can marvel at the mysteries it divulges. All masks will be discarded, and our revels will reshape the world.”
And she drew his symbol in the air.
It burned a dire mustard glow and hung there.
It would always remain, now it had been inscribed, even after its light had faded. And Oisín would never forget it. It lived in him now, stamped upon his cells, and all those he would ever pass on.
The building shook, but its foundations were set fast in ancient ways, and did not falter. It was forever marked as a way in for a receptive audience.
The atmosphere seemed denser, and Oisín struggled to breathe. Around him the shadows materialised into other forms and they leaned forward in anticipation to observe the first performance.
Everything vibrated to Orla’s voice.
She held her hand out to Oisín, and before she spoke he felt the compulsion, and the love, pull him to her. “Tonight, we will have our first reading featuring a new performer.”
He jerked upright, not in control of his limbs, terrified to see the assembly. A wave of applause coursed through him and spun him around.
Their expectation paralysed him more than their cruel faces.
Orla’s tone turned exultant. “And, the oldest actor, the original. Our father who was before and who has returned. His guises are never false, but we rarely see him true.”
She gestured to the left, and Oisín did not turn his head, for he knew once he looked upon that face, Oisín would be no more, there would only be the façade, and the performance inscribed upon his DNA that he would be compelled to act out.
The glowing sign vanished at the approach of its master. No longer necessary when its originator appeared.
Oisín heard the flapping of his tattered cloak, like the beating wings of crippled angels furious at their banishment.
Orla placed her hand upon Oisín’s back, to guide him to face the artist.
The heat of his gaze removed all of Oisín’s doubt.
Tears streamed down his cheek and he grasped his sister’s hand. Family, reunited. Communion restored.
Together they spoke the opening words, and gladly unleashed the play.
PRO PATRIA!
BY NADIA BULKIN
“Colonial life with its senseless relationships and its psychopathic participants.”
- Sutan Sjahrir, 1949
Joseph Garanga watched a small brown gecko crawl, belly to the wood, across the open window sill, and wondered why an institution that called itself the National University had installed neither window panes nor air conditioning. From the corner closest to the rotating fan, Adela read from a crumpled letter:
