‘Next morning,’ he said, ‘I dug a hole in the field and we laid the cat there, still wrapped in her jumper. It’s always haunted me Katie, the cat knowing where to go. I never knew death before that night, but it seemed so natural there, so simple just to pass on.’
Hano went quiet, wondering why then was he still unable to say goodbye to Shay, to think of him as dead and not somehow waiting for some final rendezvous?
He was unsure of their location. By road they might be forty miles from the woman’s wood. Cross country he’d little idea of direction or distance. Katie had eased her runners and socks off. Her toes were reddened and looked bruised. He wondered who she was thinking of as she lay there: Tomas, Shay, her parents? The litany of the dead seemed endless. He remembered his father dying, the cool breeze in the hospital yard as the shrunken man in the bed longed for one last taste of real air. Jail would be something like that. You might get used to other things, but never to being unable to step out beneath the stars, to feel the air on your tongue like champagne. Oblivion or jail? Justin Plunkett or the police? Whoever found him first.
Hours before he’d stared at the lake, comforting in its finality. Now he knew he’d cling to each extra moment given to him on this journey. He remembered his first meeting with Shay, the anxiety he had felt, the fear of being exposed. With Katie it was like that again, only his apprehension had taken so much longer to overcome. Even now part of him held back, sensing the barriers still within her. At any moment he expected them to snap back into the frozen silence they had always known. So many emotions were clashing within him: an aching grief for Shay, a terror of what was bound to happen when he was caught, exhaustion, hunger. Yet overriding them all was an excitement in her presence like the thrill of those early days with Shay or the heightened elation he’d felt after his first stay with the old woman.
He remembered again the first three nights he had remained sleeping on the woman’s window seat, often waking to find a cat sitting on his chest watching him with curious green eyes. They’d creep in the skylight before dawn after hunting missions through the fields, brush against him and pad to the bowl of water on the floor. Each morning stray cats, too shy or brutalized by other people to enter, would accept food or a slow pat from her at the door but dart away at his appearance.
One wall of the caravan held rows of pictures from her past: the house before the war; her family who were all dead; friends from around the world; everyone from street traders in Morocco to political prisoners in Turkey. She fought a hundred causes from the caravan. The postman brought mail from The Kremlin, Chile, South Africa, and places Hano had never even heard of. The only government she had no correspondence with was her own. Looking back, it was as if she had withdrawn from her own land, knowing it was impossible to change the Plunketts who carved it up, and had concentrated on creating her own country within her caravan instead.
At night she lit candles and they sat talking till late. Her words fascinated him though they rarely moved in a rational line, skipping through decades and countries till he could follow only the outline of what she said. But each conversation was another door opening in his fifteen-year-old mind to let in light and doubt, so that when he’d step into the dark field afterwards to breathe the night air, everything that he’d been taught to believe as permanent seemed transient and obscure.
In the afternoons he’d take her dog into the woods and report back on any overnight damage to her fences. On the last evening of his stay he climbed with her up to the top of the wood, carrying sticks to mend gaps knocked in the ditches so that cattle could get in to graze. Near the crest a line of five oaks raised their heads above the younger trees. Their trunks were coarse and indented, like ancient hardened skin. The woman began to talk of the 1930s, a time of great unhappiness when she was left alone there with two small children. A friend had written to her about a line of oak trees in a dream that had radiated strength and solace. The woman knew from the description that they were her trees. From then on, whenever she touched the fringe of despair, she would run at dawn, after a sleepless night, up through the woods to wrap her hands around a gnarled oak trunk, feeling imperceptibly an echo of its strength soak into her flesh, calming and soothing her until she was able to walk down again to face the bills and problems of a new day.
Hano reached for Katie’s hand. It was smooth, alive to touch. He remembered the field in North Dublin, the noise of the men circling the boxers, the touch of the bark beneath his skin.
‘What are you thinking of?’ she asked and suddenly, for the first time, he was able to tell somebody about Pascal Plunkett, stroking her skin for comfort, no longer embarrassed but relieved at being able to say the words.
‘You were always trying to be Shay,’ she said when he’d finished; ‘you never gave yourself any time to be you.’
He began to understand what she meant. He remembered the child hiding in the tree in the back garden; the figure lost among the screaming children in the school yard; the fifteen-year-old hiker inventing new names; the youth trying to bury himself in the shadow of his friend. To stand firmly against something you must first know who you are. He could feel no self-pity, he had allowed himself to drift where others could use him, willing always to fit into any role they gave him. The only time he’d openly been himself was in that caravan where nobody in his permanent world could have ever seen or known.
That same evening years before, when they’d repaired the fence, the old woman led him to a small clearing at the very top of the wood. Across the fields of cattle and obscured by a hedgerow that bordered the narrow road was an old quarry. A lorry was leaving, having dumped its load of white plastic sacks on to the mound already there. Some sacks had burst open, white grains like salt glinting in the evening sunlight. The two farmers with the cattle also owned the lorries. They drove them in rotation from the chemical factory near Sligo to dump the waste in their disused quarry. The company was banned from America and was not allowed in any other European country. The woman had heard that they operated two sister plants, in Africa and South America. Most of the government front bench had been at the opening. It was now the major local employer. Those who spoke against it were enemies of the community. There were mortgages to be paid, new bungalows to be built in place of the cottages Hano saw crumbling on the side-roads.
They watched the lorry cross the humpbacked bridge by the small crossroads and brake as a second lorry approached. The drivers stopped, their wheels slicing the grass verge on both sides of the road as they chatted together. The old woman began to walk back towards the ruined house, taking an overgrown path through the left side of the wood to show Hano leaves that were blackened and withered, a sward of decay cutting through the green foliage.
‘A woman in the village asked me would I not prefer a house,’ she said, crinkling one of the leaves in her hand. ‘A permanent home, was how she described it. That’s what they think they have Francis, like my husband’s family trying to keep up the ugly old house down there for decades. There was a fire at that dump in March, although none of the papers reported it. If the wind had been from the west the whole wood might have been destroyed. Luckily only these trees were in the path of the smoke, plus all the farms and houses behind us. You could see the children coughing for weeks afterwards, their eyes bloodshot. Next spring we’ll see if the leaves come back or the cattle are stillborn. Once I thought you could have a permanent home. Maybe it’s just old age, but after watching those bags split open and death blowing around the quarry, I’m happier with my caravan out among the fields at the mercy of the wind.’
It was her strangeness that had fascinated him then; only now did her words begin to make sense. Permanency was what he’d longed for; life with Shay to continue for ever, neither ageing nor marrying, both locked into that flat for ever and ever like bodies trapped in a peat bog. He gazed at the mountainside around him and knew that what made Katie’s presence with him more real and precious was the inevitability that they wou
ld be parted. Despite his terror, it felt good to he there with the danger making each moment as intense as a child’s first experiences. Once he would have kept trying to put a shape on their relationship. Now he said nothing.
She lay beside him like a shy hare crouched in the grass, whom only time and patience would coax out into the light. Her eyes betrayed nothing of her thoughts. He knew better than to mention Leitrim again. Katie turned, catching him observing her and smiled as she ran a blade of grass between her fingers.
‘Go on Hano,’ she said, ‘I want to hear about her.’
If he had told his parents when he came home the first time, it might have been all right. He had meant to, but when he returned to Dublin there seemed no words that would bridge the gap between her book-lined caravan and the terrace house where his father shaved before the cracked mirror and walked in his overalls to Plunkett Motors. Twice a week a battered mobile library creaked on to the cracked concrete across from the post office, the bored assistants reading as the borrowers browsed through the same titles yellowing on the shelves. There had been no books in his world, only the blare of the television from half-five each evening, the inanities of quiz shows, neighbours gathering to watch the Eurovision Song Contest. Ghosts were meant for Friday night at eight, interrupted by ads, forgotten by nine in the mystery of The Fugitive. Young people and old people were like separate species in a zoo. The television serials said so. It would have seemed unnatural, even morbid to his mother, for him to have anything in common with the old woman. And he knew that to his father she would be ‘an old Protestant woman’, though it would not be her religion that he would find worrying. Half Hano’s street were Protestants, they lived and mixed together as one. Differences were only mentioned when somebody died and people wondered what to send instead of a Mass card. It was her class that would be the problem, even though she was poorer now than anybody in her village. But she was still a part of that barbarous race who had once controlled the land.
So he said nothing, but sneaked back twice that year, inventing the most banal safe destinations. Each evening he’d wander up the wooded avenue at dusk but always stop when he reached the bend before her ruined house, daring himself on but unable to shake the notion that if he did a waiting figure would emerge from within it. He’d turn back, almost running, till the electric light at the village edge broke the fear within him.
A sheep appeared from behind the rock at Katie’s head, stared unblinkingly at them and bounded away. Katie rolled over and closed her eyes.
‘I could see how the men in the village thought of her as a half-mad nuisance,’ Hano said. ‘Walking miles in the rain to make them move their cows if they let them stray into the wood, or to complain when they beat a dog or allowed a sick calf starve to death. But they still had a curious respect for her, Katie. You know, because even though she had returned from wandering around the world to live in a caravan with only a few acres of woodland left, she remained the wife of the man who’d ruled the village, the last of the family name chiselled in stone over their church altar.
‘Had she been an outsider, I think she’d have been found in a ditch with her head battered by a rock. But even though she was penniless and old, there was still an aura about her they couldn’t shake off. Their wives went to her for advice, surreptitiously at first and then more openly. Some evenings I’d visit the local pub. They hated Dubliners there but her friendship protected me. One night a farmer filled me with pints. I wasn’t used to drink and began to ramble on about the dump and the cattle while a sullen silence grew at the bar.
‘“What the fuck would you know, ye fucking Jackeen,” a young man muttered sourly. The older ones pulled their black overcoats tighter, their caps screwed down on their heads, and watched. I blathered about my father being from a farm in Kerry until the farmer asked his name and then, with a dismissive snort, started describing my grandparents to me. Your man had been in school with my father. I sobered up when his name was mentioned, feeling suddenly exposed. I could see the whole pub grinning, Katie, they knew they’d got the measure of me.’
Hano was back home a week before the farmer’s letter came. He came in from school, it was the first time his father ever struck him. He looked down at his hand while Hano held his face, then began to shout about people wasting land, her refusing to sell her ten acres of wood so they could be levelled for cattle, denying her neighbours prosperity. Although it was thirty years since Hano’s father had turned a sod of grass, whatever the letter had said, he took it as an insult to his masculinity that his son would visit such a person.
‘They couldn’t understand why I’d lied to them,’ Hano told her. ‘And I couldn’t explain it, Katie. I could say fuck all -just stand there as the endless questions came. That night in bed I heard the murmur of their voices downstairs, the worry, the incomprehension. I don’t know what they thought – that she’d corrupted me somehow, and she had, but in ways they could never have imagined. “We didn’t shoot enough of them in ‘22,” my father said the next day when I tried to talk to him. The words were so unlike him, Katie, it was like he was saying them to prove something to himself.’
‘And that was it?’ she asked.
Hano remembered how the younger children had loved her. He’d watch them arrive early to reach the caravan before their friends and bask in the importance of talking to her alone, gazing at the rows of old books on the cramped shelves and twisting up their noses at the unfamiliar scent of incense. The old woman would talk to them, knowing that in a few years they’d be embarrassed at having ever gone to her. On the bus that went twice a week to Sligo they’d sit away from her, deliberately boisterous with their friends, sniggering at the mad old woman. Hano knew that he could have gone back, could have written. But he had stopped, suddenly ashamed at the thought of her. He’d seemed to lose the sense of her, to see her only through his father’s eyes. And it wasn’t only her he’d forgotten, but all she had said, the sense of wonder in that caravan where the only clock was a broken one with the word Now! written on a piece of carboard stuck over its face. On the Saturday after the farmer’s letter came he had gone down town and returned with a punk haircut. He remembered how happy his parents had been, his oddity now a recognized one, like the ones they saw young people condemned for on television.
‘I wonder if she understood?’ he asked Katie. ‘She had a way of knowing what went on in people’s heads.’
Katie opened her eyes and stared at him, the same unblinking look he’d known back in Dublin.
‘Will she still be there Hano?’
‘Her wood might be. The ruined house. Maybe.’
‘What if it’s not?’
He shrugged his shoulders. She looked away, prised her tight shoes back on and, without waiting for him, began to walk.
CHAPTER FOUR
Tuesday Evening
All evening as they crossed the mountain black clouds were lowering themselves slowly on to the hill like spacecraft coming to rest. Katie and Hano walked through the mist, their progress impeded by streams and patches of bog. They ignored the first soft drops that clung like vapour to their hair. Towards seven o’clock they reached a small road where an old man was digging in the tiny field behind his house, his felt cap pulled down, oblivious to the weather.
It was the first time that day they had seen land under tillage. The field had been laboriously reclaimed from the bog which lurked beyond the thick stone walls. There were rows of carrots and cabbage, a scraggy line of twigs separating them. They crouched behind a boulder, waiting for him to go in. Hano stared at the carrots, his dry mouth aching for their raw flesh. Finally the old man plodded towards the cottage, parking his spade against the white wall. They scrambled down, shoving against each other in their haste to reach the vegetables. When their hands were full they ran, afraid to look back, filled with shame and ravenous hunger. They cleaned the carrots in a small stream that trickled down rocks beside the boreen and ate them raw.
The rain was
growing heavier. Hano found a plastic wrapper crumpled up in the ditch and gave it to Katie for her head. She slit the side of it and pressed it down over her hair as a makeshift hood. A car appeared far behind them, its headlights catching the drizzle as they crouched down till it passed. They were cold and exhausted. Nausea had displaced his hunger since he’d eaten. She cupped her hands to drink from the stream and climbed back up on to the road without speaking. He followed her hunched shoulders in silence.
They moved down the hillside in the drizzle. The wind had risen with an uncanny sound across the open expanse of bog, clearing the mist, bringing heavier rain. The road twisted past the ruins of cottages with plastic sacks strewn at the base of the County Council No Dumping signs. Terraces had been dug like mass graves in the bog, the turf piled to dry in stacks covered with plastic. The wind blew the rain into their faces. They reached a main road and swung left towards the gateway of a field hidden from the road, climbing on to the bars to rest. Occasionally cars passed at high speed, showering them with water from the road. Down the hill, near the lake, they saw the lights of a hotel, cars pulling in and out, distant figures chatting in the real world. Hano lowered his head, then raised it with a sick feeling when he heard an engine coming to a halt.
Katie’s hand touched his as they gazed fearfully at the stationary white Volkswagon van. Two men in their twenties sat in the front, mocking grins beneath their neat moustaches. Hano stared in incomprehension till he noticed the blonde teenage girl in the back training a video camera on them. The men in front were pulling faces, waving their fists, trying to coax some reaction from them. Disappointed, the driver moved off, the camera still filming as the van was lost in the bushes.
‘Fucking Germans,’ Katie said. She thought for a moment before continuing. ‘You know, when I was around eleven I started asking my uncle about the funeral. Before that I’d never mention it. But I began to think about it: what was it like; who was there? He was uneasy when I asked. Maybe it was so sudden, that he remembered shag all about it himself. All he ever mentioned was this car pulling up across the road from the graveyard as they were about to lower the coffins. The priest paused for a moment, thinking they were mourners who’d travelled all morning to reach there.
The Journey Home Page 21
