Jonah was sitting in the front seat, lighting a cigarette. Blue clouds of smoke filled the pale beige space. I stirred to shake the mist out of my head. Jonah turned, his muddy eyes were clouded.
‘You,’ he pointed a long and sharp finger at me, ‘were not looking where you were going.’
I moaned. I could smell the stale whiskey now, under the fresh smoke.
‘What will we do?’ he asked me. ‘What will we do now?’
I managed to make a noise like, ‘Home.’
He brought me to Solas. He knew where to go. He had been watching me all the while.
I took the invitation of blackness.
* * *
I woke and found Carmel and Eddie sitting with me.
‘She should be in the hospital,’ Eddie was saying.
‘Myrna says no need,’ Carmel spoke in a scraping whisper. She was hunched up in the chair beside me, like a piece of discarded clothing. I could see she was weak with the need to sleep. When Myrna came in her eyes had shrunk into deep sockets. I found myself moving. I was still whole.
Myrna saw my eyes were awake and she placed her thumbs over them and leaned down to me and whispered known words into my ear that caused life’s heat and movement to return.
‘Welcome back,’ she said, as she stood up and smiled with an unhidden caring.
Eddie and Carmel moved to see if I was the same person who had left my body seven days and nights ago to go to a place I could not remember anything of, except it had been a long way off.
In the intervening week much had happened.
* * *
Myrna opened the door. She looked at Jonah. He shifted and gabbled like a turkey about the wet of the day and not being able to see in front of him. He did not mention my name so she was left to form her own assumptions which caused her to push past him and wrench open the car door and cry out.
‘How could you leave her there? Why did you not say something at once?’
She made to pull me out of the car, but had not the strength to. Jonah had to lift me out. Together they carried me into the house and put me down on my bed. Myrna felt me.
‘She has grown cold already.’
She peeled off my stained and torn clothes and she felt Jonah’s eyes watching.
‘Go. Do not come back in here.’
Carmel and Eddie found a pearl-blue Jaguar parked outside, and inside the house a strange, all-eyed man sitting at their table.
‘Upstairs,’ the strange man said. He did not look at them.
They found the room filled with a smell like burning liquorice, and Myrna standing over my body, which was still but for the streaming of blood from my head and the rising of bruises that stole the shape of my face. She was sponging me with liquid from a bowl.
‘What’s the smell?’ Eddie asked.
‘Life fighting death,’ Myrna spoke.
‘I’ll go for a doctor,’ Eddie suggested.
‘Too far gone for that,’ Myrna snapped. ‘Too far for doctors to reach her.’
Downstairs, the all-eyed man was gone, into the dark and dreadful day.
Myrna sat beside me for the days and nights I slept. And downstairs Carmel braved fire and made it serve a purpose by making food on it, which sustained Eddie and her into the long nights they kept watch.
* * *
The fourth day after the accident had already turned to evening when Jonah returned, with flowers. Myrna was sleeping for a while and Carmel had done the same, both exhausted. Eddie answered the door. He told Jonah to leave or to expect the police at any moment. Jonah saw that there was no phone and so took his time to explain to the small and angry man that he was not at fault in this. The girl had been in the middle of the road on a wet day and he had no time to stop. He had brought her here because she had asked for here.
‘I know Sive, she takes care of my father at St Manis Home. I was on my way to visit him.’
‘At seven in the morning?’ Eddie enquired.
‘My father is very ill. I see him whenever I can. Could I please see her? I only want to give her the flowers.’
‘She’s no need of them now, she’s out cold still.’
‘Should she not be in hospital?’ Jonah asked.
‘That is what I said. No one ever listens to me around here.’ Eddie sighed. ‘I suppose a minute will do no harm. A minute, mind!’
‘We should be bringing her to the hospital,’ Eddie said on the way up the stairs. ‘But they won’t let me. They say wait. I’d hate to see what would happen to me if I got cancer. They’d probably give me an aspirin and a hot-water bottle.’
Jonah said, ‘What do we know about women?’
In that moment, Eddie took a small step back into the man’s world he so missed, felt the welcome logic of a sex he understood, even if this man was a strange example of it.
* * *
Jonah peeled back the sheet to examine the form that had caused a savage wanting in him. Since he had first seen me, he had watched and followed, staying far away, as he had learned to stay.
But he knew the time was on hand to draw near and claim what he had waited for all his life. He put his hands on me.
In that moment he felt a cold blade held against his neck. He turned to find no one. He went to touch me again and the blade was there again. He moved away and out of the room. The ghost of Noreen Moriarty stood behind the door he had just closed, her eyes were such that, if he had seen them, Jonah Cave would have left for good and not come back.
But he did not see. When I woke, he resolved, he would speak to me and win me with the promises of all the things I could never have in this damp and old place.
Eddie was waiting downstairs with a whiskey bottle on the table. Jonah had been much longer than a minute.
Long hours passed in the kitchen until night had grown deep and dark. The ghost of Noreen Moriarty went and rose Myrna out of sleep. She would not let the old woman rest.
‘Why should I get up? It’s night,’ Myrna groaned.
Noreen nudged her with an insistence that did not pass. Eventually Myrna, having looked in on me, came to the top of the stairs.
Jonah found himself standing at the sight of Myrna. As she came down the staircase he once more felt the cold blade against the back of his neck, the hollow echo of his disappearing spirit. Myrna saw the two silent men and a half-bottle of whiskey on the table between them, and without a word she opened the door and asked both of them to walk through it.
Jonah went to the door, but not before her eyes held his. In hers he saw all the emptiness he had known and her intention to bring him back to it if he returned.
Carmel woke next and when Myrna told her what had happened Eddie was not let back into the house. He spent a night in the barn.
‘He’s to be kept away, Eddie.’ Carmel spoke to him in anger for the first time the next morning. Eddie had vanished down the road with Jonah in his pearl-blue Jaguar. A lovely car all the same. Jonah told him he had a good job when Eddie asked after what line of work he was in. Jonah paid for all the drinks.
Eddie did not see what was wrong with him at all. But he did not say that to Carmel. He said instead, ‘It was an accident, Carmel, he told me what happened.’
Jonah had told Eddie several times, until Eddie had put his hands over his ears and said, ‘Don’t tell me again. I know.’
‘We will have to wait for her to wake to find out,’ Carmel said, filling a basin with hot water. She took a cloth from the linen press and went up to give it to Myrna.
‘He does not seem a bad sort, Carmel,’ Eddie called after her, then sat in the stew of his own anger and hangover.
When she came down, Carmel went to the kitchen and filled a pan with beans. She cut up some bread to make toast over the fire and poured hot tea while Eddie used an old wire coat hanger to do the job of toasting. As they watched the bread go golden brown, the moment did likewise. They grew warm to each other again and the food tasted well. He held her in his arms and they lay on the rug an
d drank steaming tea and kissed until her eyes turned to the stairs and who was up them and she rose to go and check.
‘There isn’t a stir out of Sive,’ Carmel trembled with the cold of the upstairs. ‘Myrna won’t come down either. I said we’d take tea up to her.’
‘I’ll take it up, Sive will wake soon enough. She’s strong that girl,’ Eddie whispered, and put his arms around her.
Myrna came to the top of the stairs and called, ‘She is waking.’
When I did it was with the fiercest hunger I have ever known. I ate the whole of a dozen eggs collected from the reluctant hens that had gathered around, acting as if they owned the place. I drank hot tea while the soda of the bread and the salt on my eggs sharpened me out of the sleep.
‘Where did I go?’ I asked Myrna.
‘A long way off.’
She had a new weakness in her and something dark about her. The long wait had worn her.
27 ∼ The Voyages of Other Men
IT WAS ONLY after I was wakened that Eddie thought of going to see Sister Mauritius to explain I had an accident.
‘You are lucky her position is not filled,’ Sister Mauritius said. ‘When will she be fit for work?’
He said he did not know but that I was wanting to come back soon.
* * *
Thomas was at his wits’ end. His dreams had lost their colour and the sense of me in them was fading. He could not sleep when such bleakness awaited him. So he paced the corridors. He drank coffee with the night attendant who had handled him so roughly in former days and played cards with him.
Then he walked the gardens until the steel light of dawn crept up again. At the gates he stood, afraid to find in the wider world what he had truly become. In St Manis he was a well man, beyond he would translate into a sick and weak one.
‘Have you left me without a word?’ he whispered, after my disappearance down the long hill of Pass If You Can.
Sister Mauritius did not tell anyone of the accident. She wished first to get to the bottom of it before taking me back to work.
Two weeks passed without sight of me. St Michael’s ward had been concerned at first and then all talk of concern faded when it seemed I was not coming back.
Thomas did not let this put him back to where he had been when I met him. He forced himself to go on and in going on he found himself poring once more over the details of his forgotten life. The images he had tried to piece together back in the little boxroom now were on hand and full in their display of life, colour, suffering, joy, darkness and death.
He opened the boxes, all labelled by assignment, country, year, a copy of each of the published articles relating to his work, clipped to the original material. He had been meticulous. Jonah’s ring-binder efforts seemed patchy compared to this catalogue.
He marvelled at the blindness of his eyes and the hard nature of his heart.
How could he not have seen the whole world in the toothless grin of an old tribesman, his face too lined to go back in time and so many reasons for wanting to?
How could he have taken the photo of a young girl with a younger brother or sister bound by one piece of cloth to her back? How could he have taken it when her eyes told him not to?
He sifted through the years. He found not one trace of his humanity in them. Not one trace of him, even in the personal albums of small black and white prints. These mounted on cream paper, captions underneath in copperplate handwriting: ‘With the Jenkins in the Transvaal’, ‘With Declan O’Connor in the St George Hotel, Beirut’, ‘With Declan O’Connor in the Holy Land’, ‘With Sister Margaret Nolan on the Kitale Mission’.
With acquaintances and colleagues and subjects and with all parts of the world and with no one.
He had left a world without his mark. He wanted to rush out and advise the young about the terrible secret of the old. In a world that has grown indifferent to them they are not to be spared the pain of emotion. They can fall in love with all the feeling of their youth and none of the possibilities. Their clarity housed in decayed bodies that cannot hope to bring their thoughts to fruition. He found himself wishing to say what the old say many times over.
‘Do all you can while you are young.’
But he knew, too, the young think they will never be old.
The eyes of another interrupted Thomas’s thoughts and he turned to find Mr Black, known for the blackness of his moods and fag bumming.
‘Is that Tunisia I see?’ A gruff voice.
‘It is,’ Thomas replied.
‘The ruins at El Jem?’ A thin seam of excitement.
‘Yes.’
‘I was there, merchant navy, 1958. Through the Suez I’d just been. That was a wonder, that Suez. I took some photos myself but I had the camera stolen in Carthage,’ Black’s words rushed. ‘Got any more to show me?’
Thomas had and by the end of the day Tony Black had seen many of them. Tony Black had been to many places.
‘That’s what I went around the world for, looking for a place to live in. Never found the one I wanted, so I went on.’
Thomas nodded. Tony Black tried to give him a smoke.
‘Don’t touch them? Well, no reason why you can’t start now. All I can say is they got me leg,’ he looked down at his stump, ‘and they can fucking well have the rest of me. I’m not giving up my fags for no one! Mind you, since Mary Sive disappeared they’ve been harder to get hold of.’
Thomas did not answer.
Black picked up another album, asking with his eyes if he could look through it.
Thomas nodded.
‘That reminds me of a girl I knew.’
‘I was once in a place where…’
Then Thomas came to the last albums, alone, the men all gone to their tea and separate thoughts. One of them held the story of Soho women. Carmel and I waited with our shared green eyes.
‘You,’ he said. ‘Grown.’
He put a thumb on the child’s brow and watched the green eyes, grey in monochrome, but a green remembered. He stared at the green until the lights went out and then his memory stared on.
28 ∼ Myrna on Her Way
FROM THE TIME OF my dead sleep Myrna and I had not gone outside. I would not and she could not. She moved from bed to chair and from chair to bed. She held her cards against her chest and she muttered long words into the fire and they were carried out on the air. On her way.
She called me to her, crooking her long bony finger.
‘Sive, Sive, listen to me now. When I was young I had a tall straight father who had white blond hair and a big fishing boat which took him out into the water. The water found him and his boat so fine it wanted them and it took them, leaving my mother and me all alone. And she died on the birth of another child while wailing for my father. Then the war came and I walked the world. I was alone in my wanderings. When I found you, Sive, I knew that you were already a woman, you had grown in ways I had never grown. You were alone from the first moment and you survived aloneness,’ Myrna went on. ‘But now is the time you will be tested most. All around the air feels close; I can barely breathe. It is filled with warning, Sive, and we must listen to it. Don’t be alone, Sive. Take company over aloneness. Be close to protection.’
She was fading and I could not leave her.
* * *
Carmel came to me many days later and said, ‘You need to get out again.’
I did not answer her. Eddie had helped Myrna to bed, in a downstairs room that we had made up for her, since she had grown too weak to climb stairs.
‘There is no weight left in her at all.’
Myrna was disappearing before our eyes. There were shadows where life had once been.
‘How can I leave Myrna?’ I said to my mother.
‘If you don’t get back to work you’ll have no work to get back to!’ Eddie came in on us. ‘We can’t all four of us live off window-cleaning money.’
‘I’ll mind her,’ Carmel promised. ‘I’ll look after her well.’
* * *
I made my way up the hill slowly, my ears and eyes searching for signs of Jonah. None.
The gates were a welcome sight for once; my body had lost strength.
Thomas was different. I found him talking easily with the men and I found him dressed in clothes of his own and the fit of them said he had grown into himself. He had put on weight and he had begun to use his bad arm.
I found the pain of missing him turn to a kick of joy, which took the wind out of me. I could see his eyes fill with delight before he hardened them and turned away to continue his conversation.
Said Joe O’Reilly, ‘That was a long holiday you had. We were not certain you were coming back.’
‘It was no holiday.’
I went to Sister Mauritius.
‘You took your time. I had a day or two more in me and then you were no longer employed here,’ she said. ‘You will find Sister Saviour gone to the missions. I am looking after your ward personally for the present.’
Her eyes said that whatever fight had been, Sister Mauritius had won it.
I went to Thomas then, who was lying on his bed.
‘Have you Sister Saviour’s address?’ I asked. ‘I would like to write to her.’
‘I have, in the drawer there, help yourself. Could you pull the curtains round my bed?’ he asked. ‘I need to sleep.’
I did and remained inside them. He stood up and put his hand on me. I turned into him and he pulled me into his chest and I put my lips to it and my arms around him and we rocked slowly back and forth.
‘Where have you been, girl? Where have you been?’
He wanted to tell me that he knew me, but when he moved back to look at me, he saw a sore turning to scar on my temple and he put his fingers to it.
‘What happened to you? Where did you get this? Who did this?’
‘Nothing and no one. I fell.’
I did not tell him. I thought of the father and the son and the need for peace between them. I knew that the peace could not be reached if I told Thomas the truth.
‘Thomas?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you still of a mind to leave here?’
‘More mind than ever,’ he whispered.
The Lost Souls' Reunion Page 17
