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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Prologue. The Leave-Taking
1. Hoar Rock
2. The Road of Swords
3. Roaming Done
4. Shod
5. Meeting with the End
6. Professional Love
7. The Daughter of Life
8. Back to the Streets
9. Welsh Lucy’s Request
10. All Small beside Him
11. Noreen, by Way of Dreams
12. The Quiet Leaving of Noreen Moriarty
13. The Way Home
14. The Card of Beginnings, of Dreams
15. A Lost Place at the Edge of the World
16. Them Together Again
17. Laid Bare
18. This One Never Talks
19. Thomas Lives Again
20. The Same Love
21. The Coming of Summer
22. As It Was in the Beginning
23. The Beginning of One
24. The One Who Watches
25. No Joy
26. To the Dead and Back
27. The Voyages of Other Men
28. Myrna on Her Way
29. Not Ready to Go on – The Card of Passage
30. Paid Twice to Look Once
31. Like Old Times
32. Blood and Hair and Fire Flowing
33. Bound to Go to Heaven Now
34. Bound to Go to Hell Now
35. The Last Words of Myrna
36. Death the Visitor
37. The Meeting
38. Unspared
39. All Redemption Gone
40. Thomas Comes
41. The Wanderer Reborn
42. Mothering Years
43. All That Have Died Are Contained in Me
44. The Years Go By
Copyright
For Chubb
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There is something to be said in thanking everyone and mentioning no names. If I do leave one out you know who you are and that I am grateful to you.
Chubb, Michael, Johnston did everything in his power to help me and so the book is dedicated to him. My sister Amanda read it and helped me to produce a manuscript in presentable form.
My friend and ally Tony Baines was the first to set eyes on the book and did his utmost to encourage me. Marian Keyes, who happens to be married to him, is one lucky woman and also a constant source of support.
Ailish Connelly also read it as it was being written and gave me her valuable thoughts. Gai Griffin kept me going with her words and criticisms and insight. Morag Prunty – fabulous woman, fabulous friend – took it upon herself to believe in the book. Biba Hartigan had her own words for me and they made me get over the hump of sending it out into the world of publishing.
Julie Duane, Moira Reilly, Pauline O’Hare, San Orme, Susan Byrne, Sorcha Schlindwein, Birna Helgadottir, Frankie Smith, Clem and Jula Cairns – all of them have offered encouragement.
Marianne Gunn O’Connor is phenomenal – she stayed with Lost Souls and myself and proved that there was a point in trying to get published and not just hiding things under sofas.
At Picador – Peter Straus saw something and for that I will always be grateful. Becky Senior and Maria Rejt both worked with me to get to what I was trying to say. Becky in particular – thank you for all the work you put in.
Sue Townsend hid things under sofas for years and was kind enough not to let me do the same.
Julie Lombard hides things in teapots unashamedly and pours excellent kindness and inspiration.
Claudia Nielsen – a Brazilian with a wardrobe the size of Rio and a heart to match helped me more than she will ever know.
My mother and father – Jimmy and Marina – housed me in hard times while my brother Alan and his wife Siobhan gave me their daughter Emma to play with and take my mind off things like trying to find endings – since Emma is such a wonderful beginning.
Alberic reintroduced me to my life force.
Catherine reintroduced me to myself.
Then there was Albie. Now there are Rory and Finn.
Prologue ∼ The Leave-Taking
THE CARDS ARE OLD, frail friends. Spidery outlines and shadows. They come alive in the right hands.
Most of the Scarna townland has come looking for the fortune-teller. They do not come again because I tell truth as I see it, not fortune. They choose to make me the mad woman of the town and I am content with their choice. It means the three miles between them and me is rarely crossed. I am left to my madness, they to theirs.
The cards. All of me contained and lost in them. We have shared much past, and the future is an honest place in their company.
They called to me from a dark corner of the house where they rest in the quiet of their wooden box. They had advised me on Simon’s leave-taking before now, told me we would have one more year.
So before I spread the truth in front of me I knew what it was. The card of the Leave Takers fell between the Fruits of the Earth and the Wanderer. The Leave Takers shows a man and woman on opposite sides of a valley, their arms outstretched to each other.
It is more often than not related to death or the loss of a loved one. The last time I saw it Simon’s chosen father was dying. But the presence of the fruits, encased in the womb of earth, told of a parting between mother and child.
It has happened.
I closed the door on Simon’s departure this morning and found a hole in my life. The shape of his leave-taking all around, too good a man and son not to be missed.
My mothering days are at an end. These are the days now of goodbye and alone.
He was conceived in the worst moment of my life and he protected me from that moment. He sustained me by inviting me into his resting place in the womb, giving me the peace of the unborn for a while. When I put him to my breast for the first time I knew no lover’s lips would bring that kind of joy.
My bold, strong boy grew into the gentlest of men. We are not alike; you would not look at us and see a mother and son. Simon has always been my opposite. I am dark to his fair. I have always been old, to his all-young soul. He was my teacher and I was his. We fought only because my love was all around him and above everything he prizes free breath.
When he was five, he went to school wearing one of my skirts with a gold belt. I could not persuade him to take it off with words and I have never laid a harmful hand on him. I waited for him outside the school gate and soon he appeared, his face red, laughter following him, ringing through the gaps in the old, worn windows.
Today leaves me with the same feeling that I had then. Put him now where he has always been – put the long bulk of him in the too-small bed and the feet too big for most shoes on either side of the bed rails. Put him in the barn and have him lift bales as if they were feathers. Put him on the shoreline with the white horses racing in to meet him with his wild blond hair, laughing back at the playful and delighted waves. Put him with the animals that are sick and lost and watch the bucket-sized hands move fine and deft and restoring. Put him with the people of the town and his big head reaches down from the air of giants to the smaller ones who want words with him.
We all want Simon. Anyone near him is alive. I gave him life and he brought it back to me. What is there for me now? My fate is the only one the cards will not shed l
ight on. There is no self-prophecy. Everyone needs mystery, or we would lie down and die. The cards tell me only of Simon’s journey.
The Wanderer’s appearance, wind and purpose snapping at his heels, impatient for the long stretch of road and discovery ahead, showed me the route for my son will be into the heart of things.
Simon is passionately involved with the world. He has a place at its centre. I find fear for myself in that. I am here, where the edges meet the past and remain forgotten. All my life I have taken care of people, now I have only people to remember.
* * *
The animals have fallen strangely quiet since Simon left this morning. His old tired mongrels trail closely, pine with me, sniffing the sense of loss and lack of purpose in the air. We cannot find comfort.
My eyes are drawn to the open fire. The smoky heat stings them, the orange glare forces them to close and the first tears begin to fall. I cry until I sleep.
When I wake the fire has gone out, my body is frozen and curled. The cards call, with my red eyes I ask: ‘What am I supposed to do?’
The card of the Storyteller makes itself known – a mouth at the centre of a circle. The card of tales told and tales to come, on lips that have spoken and lips that do not speak.
I run a bath and step into the hot swirl. The water opens my skin and runs through to the empty places, brought about by loss and separation from all those dear to me.
In the long glass I see a woman of forty-two years – all present. My skin shows the blood of many races runs through my veins. I press my hot body against the steamed-up glass, gasp at the coolness and leave my imprint: the curves of my breasts, hips and abdomen, the points of my nose, chin and forehead.
I rub oil into my skin. In the glass I watch my eyes. I leave the look behind and put on my dress, green velvet, worn smooth as eels in cool waters. It has no shape but my own for I made it with these hands, empty now of purpose. The shape of my life these past twenty years it has. I could wear no other dress on this night. Like my mother I do not wear shoes.
I leave the bathroom with a steam cloud that follows me down the long corridor. I open doors to rooms that have been shut off for many years. Behind each one friends wait. Together we walk down the staircase to join others who have assembled by the fire.
I am aware of Simon’s absence, he is the only other living being who belongs with these people. But then I see the crib beside my chair and he is here, as he was in the first year of his life, smiling in his sleep. I sit by the fire. The cards have been left out on the side table.
The new moon is watching us through the open window – her eye narrowed to a cautious slit. Summer is almost gone, the world is changing. I have to think about where to start and, from the company assembled, I find it to be at a beginning before mine. A long way back. We will be here until morning.
The room is small so most of my friends have to stand, but in the chair on the other side of the hearth, Simon’s chosen father, my Beloved, sits. He is as I remember him and love him. Myrna and my mother Carmel together on the old, threadbare couch. Myrna’s black eyes watch. Carmel sits with her knees curled up under her chin. She is wearing her blue dress. She has found something I never knew her to have.
It is as if they never left.
I turn the first of the cards and, still, the Storyteller. In the Storyteller the weave of past history and present intent is to be found, in the Storyteller the threads of the future are to be found and gathered together.
The story is told in and from the place it began. In the old house which knew such despair and came to know what joy meant. Solas is the name of the house, the place where the lost souls found refuge and it will always be so. It is protected by the long arms of time.
Sive is the name on me. I am the Storyteller. I am the last of the Lost Souls – reunited for an evening.
1 ∼ Hoar Rock
THE TIDE OF STORYTELLING, which ebbs and flows between past and present, brings us to the shoreline that Solas overlooks. The waves wash around the bare feet of a young woman, whose soles are so hard she has run across the stones like they were bog cotton. The wind whips hair across her face; her skirt twists around her swollen belly.
The sun sets on her.
She raises her arms above her head, slides into the dancing water, wincing as it creeps around her hips. She waits for the big wave, starts to count them:
‘One … two…’ The sand shifts and she can no longer stand.
‘Three … four…’ The air is warm, but the sea still has a cold bite and from the waist down she is numb. ‘Five … six…’
She breathes out. Her ribs reach for her lungs.
The jaws of the seventh wave open wide and swallow her, she curls up, sinks like a stone. A body now more water than flesh. She does not fight the change.
‘Take me down. Take me away.’
The sea tosses and turns like a restless sleeper and the woman, thrown now on to her back, can see the dark liquid clouds of evening closing in the light. A heron skims across the wave tops, as if searching for silver gleams of mackerel. But it wants the woman with the red-gold hair. The heron dives and meets with no resistance, catching her by locks that are the same colour as this drowning sun. Heron and woman break the waves fast claiming all that is left of the day.
The thunderous roar of air drives the limpness out of her; she thrashes against the bird’s grip. Whole hanks of hair are torn from her head, but the heron holds fast and the beat of its wings is steady over the short distance to the shore.
Once the woman reaches firm footing the heron can no longer hold the weight and retreats to a rock. It rests with all the stillness and all the grace the drenched, spewing woman stumbling on to the shore lacks. The heron curves its long neck into its breast. The light of owls is thickening.
* * *
When the woman wakes it is to find the heron gone, and that the waves have once more turned to melting copper under a sun now rising. She wonders if she tried to drown again this morning whether death might be warmer.
But there is the dull ache of defeat in her bones and the knowledge that the heron would return. She is a child of the sun and it has risen, asking her to live another day.
Up the long laneway from the beach to the house, Carmel Moriarty walks with a worn look about her. The wild desire for freedom has gone and her shoulders slope with the weight of what is ahead of her.
She wraps her hands around her belly, whispers to it – ‘God protect both of us.’
Her father is waiting, a strap pressed against his thigh. As she squeezes past him in the doorway her body folds in on itself. He stares down the road she has just walked up and closes the door.
* * *
Carmel Moriarty grew up in Solas. Then it was known as Hoar Rock – a cold place. Once home to a large family, the line had dwindled to the nothing Joseph Moriarty knew he was.
The land did not co-operate with farming, running along the shoreline as it did. It turned Joseph Moriarty into a demon. He put care into the stony soil and it spat rocks back at him. That taught him only to hate the earth. His crops were miserable, their growth stunted by the harsh, salt-laden winds.
He took his frustration out in public bars, where he never stood a round of drinks. No woman would go near him until Noreen.
Noreen Byrne, then, had the reputation for being fast and loose in times when the fast and loose were good to roll around with in woods and fields but bad to settle down with.
The image of Noreen stands before me now.
You were a fine, strong woman, Noreen, with a ready laugh! But you enjoyed life too much, that’s what they said. You reached twenty-eight and realized no man wanted to share your years with you and even if they did their mothers wouldn’t let them. So you cast your eye around and found the truth in a short man with granite features and no real smile, only the cruel kind.
Sit, Noreen, while I tell them.
The truth was Joseph Moriarty was the only one if she did not want
to die alone. The others slid off to safer territory with tighter women and paid the price of being bored all their lives.
In time you wished to be alone, you learned. But at twenty-eight you had different wants. You had no proper home. Your parents were in a tied cottage, which would be lost when they died. You cleaned and gutted fish. Who would want to do that for the rest of their natural born days?
So you asked him to dance. He would not. So you sat down beside him and asked him to talk to you. He would not. You followed him around like a puppy dog for five solid months, swallowing everything like pride, before you got him.
He never bought you an engagement ring, or a present, or even a drink.
You never kissed while you were courting. You never kissed after you were wed.
A woman with Noreen Byrne’s bones and laugh, a terrible shame that no one should have kissed or made love to her in married life! All of us assembled agree on that one.
I can feel the cold-to-the-bone presence of the man I never met. Where are you, Joseph Moriarty? Show your face.
His eyes are before me now, telling me he would plant me like one of his crops into the stony soil with half a chance. He is here because he is part of us by blood and incident.
The spirit of Joseph Moriarty is welcome to stay in a room full of friends, but only until his part is played and I promise that the truth will not be changed in his favour. It will be put in front of him.
2 ∼ The Road of Swords
THE TRUTH IS PUT in front of Joseph Moriarty as it was in front of Noreen when she crossed this threshold for the first time on her wedding day, to find nothing but broken bits of furniture and dirt. The house had been fine, two storeys, with an oak staircase and many rooms.
People prosperous enough to appreciate fine sea views, in days when most sheltered from them for the sake of warmth, had built the Hoar Rock farmhouse. But the Moriarty name now came down to one man and that one man had closed off all but a few rooms to light and to habitation, not just because of cold. There was dark in him, a weight put on him from the first breath of his life.
The Lost Souls' Reunion Page 1
