Away

by Jane Urquhart

  “Time,” McGee announced, “will come to the aid of impartial justice.”

  In the words “impartial justice” she heard the song of her father’s tongue … the suggestion of poetry. She bent forward to scrutinize the speaker. The enemy, she thought, is a small, corrupt man. Where does his voice come from?

  She looked questioningly at Aidan, her face registering the confusion that she felt. The country described by the speaker was one in which there would be no factions, no revenge for old sorrows, old grievances. Everything about it was to be new, clear; a landscape distanced by an ocean from the zones of terror. A sweeping territory, free of wounds, belonging to all, owned by no one.

  The man called Patrick was sprawled in his chair, apparently asleep, but Eileen sensed Aidan’s concentration – so fervent it enveloped his whole body.

  McGee had come to a pause in his long address. Eileen was being shaken by sudden recollection; the privacy within the curtains of a willow, a dialogue with a blue-black bird. This, and a kind of music breaking into meaning. The words in the room had become like that, a significant message carried on cadence. She remembered now, for the first time, that as a child she had listened to a wise man.

  “There was a man,” she whispered to Aidan urgently, “a man called Exodus Crow. He knew things. He told me once – a long time ago – he told me there were no lords of the land.”

  Aidan pressed the air with his left palm, silencing her.

  McGee was concluding; his performance now as mesmerizing as one of Aidan’s dances. He was speaking to the whole room, his notes forgotten in the hand that rested on the desk in front of him. He was addressing them, he said, not as the representative of any race, any province, but as the forerunner of a generation that would inherit wholeness, a generation released from fragmentation.

  The House exploded into sound. Thumping of desks, cheering, applause.

  Eileen, released by the monstrous single-voiced roar from the trance induced by the little man’s voice, allowed the phrase “not as the representative of any race” to strike her in the heart. This is the voice, she thought, this is the power that should be harnessed. Her father had talked about Irish eloquence. Without the race of his blood this little man would not have had the voice. He has betrayed, she decided, the voice, the suffering voice.

  The bird in her mind flew away again, breaking through green.

  Aidan was rocking backwards and forwards at her side as if in pain. “Jesus Christ,” he was saying, “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ.” Lost landscapes through which she had never walked were unfolding, hill by hill, in Eileen’s thoughts. To her, McGee was the worst kind of enemy, the truly guilty; the one who knows the beauty and betrays it.

  Patrick was on his feet with the rest, clapping and cheering, his head thrown back.

  Faking, thought Eileen.

  Afterwards, Prime Minister Macdonald and the leader of the Opposition entered into a testy debate which Eileen was too distracted to follow. “Do we go … ?” she asked Aidan. “When do we go.”

  “Not until it’s over.”

  “Then?”

  “Then we go.”

  “All right,” he said when the House was finally adjourned shortly afterwards, “let’s get out of here.”

  Outside, standing confused in the shadow of the colossal building, the men were anxious and jumpy. “We should get moving,” one of them kept saying. “We should be moving now.”

  The spectators were beginning to drift homewards in various directions across the moonlit lawn.

  “We’ll catch you up,” said Lanighan. “I want to see him up close. We’ll see you at Mrs. McKenna’s Saloon. She’s the only one still open.”

  “You’ll recognize him,” one of the men said, “by his white top hat and gloves. He wears the hat to make himself look taller.”

  “Where’s Pat?” another of the men asked.

  “Gone on ahead, I guess.”

  To Eileen’s great joy Aidan had begun to play, absently, with her hair.

  “That voice of his,” she said as the men walked away through moonlight and chill, “that voice of his is something beautiful. It’s our voice, but he’s betrayed it.”

  Without answering, Lanighan seized her wrist and pulled her behind him, running to the right, towards the building called the West Block. They moved swiftly behind it, along its sandstone wall and out its gate, across Wellington and into O’Connor Street. At the corner of Sparks and O’Connor, Lanighan pushed through a break in a six-foot wooden fence and, dragging Eileen after him, entered an empty lot. Releasing her, he moved to the south side of the lot and flung himself down near a spot where two boards were broken at the bottom, leaving enough space for a man to look through or crawl through. Eileen followed and stood panting behind him. “Lie down,” he gasped.

  She scrambled to the ground. “What’s going on?” she asked. “What about the others? What are you doing?” Eileen saw the shadows of sad, unhealthy weeds move in the moonlight on the boards to the left of her. To her right there was a makeshift door and a small shed with a sign in its single window. IRISH NEED NOT APPLY, it read. “Tell me,” she said now, pulling on Aidan’s sleeve. “Tell me what’s happening.”

  “Don’t say anything,” he replied curtly.

  They lay in silence for twenty minutes, Aidan quiet and private, Eileen suffering more from his withdrawal than from a sense of danger. No part of him was touching her.

  The side of Sparks Street they could see underneath the fence was remote, bathed in dull moonlight. No wind, no sound of any kind entered this road except as an echo – footsteps or horses hooves – from another part of the city, followed by stretches of absolute silence during which Eileen noticed that Aidan was breathing in the way he sometimes did just before they began to make love, just before the frantic part when she didn’t know whether it was his breath or her own that she was hearing. Now, in the space of a few seconds, she became aware of another sound, a peculiar combination of scraping and clicking, something like that made by the second hand on the large clock in the parlour at Loughbreeze Beach Farm. She thought of her brother and felt, for the first time, the dull ache of missing him.

  Then the white top hat and one gloved hand of D’Arcy McGee came into view, then the glint of the silver handle of his cane; these glowing because of the moonlight, the rest of the man almost invisible beside the night walls that no lamps illuminated.

  “Give me the gun,” hissed Lanighan.

  “What are you going to do?” Eileen was appalled by the anticipated act shaping itself in her mind. She looked out into the street where a shadow moved. A cloud, she thought, frantically, a cloud across the moon.

  “I’m going out there,” he was saying. “Give me the gun.”

  “No.”

  Aidan ripped at her blouse. “Give it to me, Eileen … I have to have it,” he spat.

  “I can’t,” she cried. “It’s Patrick that has it. He said you wanted him to have it.”

  “Jesus.” Aidan’s face contorted before Eileen’s eyes. “Jesus … He saw your hand go to the gun when you bent over in the bar.”

  “He said that you told him –” she began. Then her words were cancelled by the sound of a single shot and the sight of a white top hat rolling away, cartwheeling down a wooden sidewalk.

  “What is it?” asked Eileen in terror. “What’s happened? Aidan …” She looked again under the fence to the opposite side of the street. A dark stain was gathering around the figure which lay, like a bad drawing of a sprinter, askew on the sidewalk. Lights were beginning to appear in windows. The sound of calling voices, running footsteps, a crowd gathering. “Did you plan this? Did you plan to kill him?”

  “Plan this?” Aidan was curled on the ground. “I loved him,” he began to sob. “Jesus God, I loved him. I was here to protect him and now I’ve killed him … you’ve killed him. I was with him” – his voice became strangled – “not against him. My God, he was our only hope.”

  “B
ut you said …” Eileen grabbed his arm but he shook her hand away. It was his least graceful gesture.

  “Who knows what I said? What does it matter what I said? Don’t you understand, I am what people like you call a goulagh – a spy – I was working for him against the fanatics – against people like you.”

  “People like me …” repeated Eileen slowly.

  Carriages, policemen, were arriving beyond the fence. A woman screamed, someone called for the coroner. Eileen heard the word “dead” pronounced in a solid male voice.

  “Oh my God,” Aidan moaned, “it’s my own death out there.”

  “I didn’t know …” Eileen’s voice was quiet, calm, but her heart was attempting to leap through her ribcage out into the street, the commotion, the murder.

  The anger that Aidan felt was most visible in his mouth; the same mouth that had whispered endearments, that had caressed every part of her body. “It was all play for you, wasn’t it,” this new mouth said. “All some kind of dream … some kind of goddamed otherworld island. You think this will make things better for our people?”

  “I never wanted …”

  Aidan staggered to his feet. He wiped his face with his sleeve, then thrust his fist towards her face. “Don’t come near me,” he hissed. “Don’t touch me.” He brought his fist back towards his own forehead. “It’s all gone now, whatever there was to work for.”

  The leering face of the man called Patrick appeared briefly in Eileen’s mind. “I didn’t kill him,” she called into the night, her voice shrill.

  “You killed him.” Aidan attacked a board with his fist. He did not look at Eileen. “Did you hear a single thing McGee said? Did you listen to what he wanted?”

  Without waiting for her to answer he stumbled across the empty, pathetic lot, across broken glass and garbage, leaving Eileen standing alone, her hair filled with wonderful moonlight, her shadow in this moonlight bent at the waist on a rough wooden fence.

  A picture of Aidan dancing in the attic room flashed through her mind, the way he curved his arm or extended his hand to accommodate an unseen partner. The captains at the inn, the lake sailors had all been wrong. His dance was not a petition to McGee; it was an expression – an affirmation – of partnership. Whenever Aidan danced, the voice of D’Arcy McGee had been present, dancing with him in the room.

  “You never talked to me,” she whispered to the emptiness. “You kept me out. You would not let me see the truth.”

  SHE spent the remainder of the night on the north side of the Houses of Parliament, seated on her shawl, her back against the curved wall of the unfinished Parliamentary Library, the grass around her silvered with moonlight and frost.

  Coming here from the empty lot she had, for a moment, joined the growing crowd and confusion surrounding the body of McGee. Looking above the heads of the spectators she saw the whole city light up, like a fragmented nation coming alive, coming to its senses. Of the body she saw only one gloveless hand, its palm full of moonlight, and a narrow stream of dark liquid running in the gutter near where it lay. Then a policeman pushed her roughly aside. Apart from this one dismissive gesture no one paid any attention to her. She turned her back to the horror, walked down Sparks Street, veered to the left at Metcalfe, and made her way up to Parliament Hill.

  She could hear the clock on the front of the mountainous building scrape and click, moving from minute to minute, reminding her of the sound of McGee’s cane advancing down the sidewalk on Sparks Street. From the distance the sound of the Chaudière Falls reached her. When the clock struck four she became aware of the vibrations of the iron bells travelling through the stones at her back, and then the river speaking to her in a voice that she knew she would carry with her for the remainder of her life. A voice at home inside her brain because it had lain there for years – dormant – waiting for the correct combination of stimuli to activate it: the sound of rushing water, a love torn apart, sudden terrible knowledge, the release from the mortal dream.

  As the sky behind the Eddy Match Factory across the river filled with light, the steady timbre of the water and rapids became sentences spoken in a soft female voice and Eileen accepted, without surprise, the presence of her mother’s lost words.

  So this is what it is to be away, her mother’s voice told her. You are never present where you stand. You see the polished dishes in your kitchen cupboard throwing back the hearth light, but they know neither you nor the meals you have taken from their surfaces. Your flagstones are a series of dark lakes that you scour, and the light that touches and alters them sends you unspeakable messages. Waves arch like mantles over everything that burns. Each corner is a secret and your history is a lie.

  Eileen turned her head to look at the solid wall against which she had rested for hours. It was not made of dark granite as she had believed, but rather a rose-coloured sandstone, benign, glowing with warmth. She reached her left arm across her breast and touched the stone beside her shoulder, trying to read the texture of its surface. It was solid, gentle, distant from her.

  She gathered her shawl around her shoulders, stood, turned her back to the Gatineau Hills, and began the long journey home.

  Liam was using the hand plough to turn the earth at the east of the house, making a kitchen garden for Molly, when he saw Eileen at the end of the lane, limping badly in her new white boots, her clothing torn and soiled, her hair tangled.

  That morning he had awakened earlier than the others in the house and had hunted up the pack he had brought with him from Elzivir Township. There, in a small side pocket, he located the object he was looking for, something Eileen had found under her father’s pillow after he died – a bone hairpin with a single thread of red-gold hair wrapped around and around it. The object spoke of frailty and loss and the scant, dissolving memory that is kept of one who has gone away. He would carry this object always in his trouser pocket, he decided, in memory of his mother, in memory of Eileen.

  “Sweet Jesus,” he said, now, under his breath. She had been gone for three weeks. He dropped the plough and ran up the lane. “Where have you been?” he yelled. “What’s this all about?”

  Eileen walked past him, staring at the house, while he staggered backwards in front of her, gesturing wildly.

  “What does this mean, Eileen? You disappear … Christ, I thought you’d be gone for seven years. Where did you go? What have you been doing?”

  The lake was choppy, a steel blue. A host of troublesome black birds were making a racket in the poplars near the shore. I must make a scarecrow for the garden, Liam thought, suddenly. Then he stared hard at his sister’s face as they reached the door. He knew nothing about this woman.

  “Eileen,” he said parentally. “Tell me where you went.”

  She sighed and kissed his cheek. “I’ve given up on outer words,” she said. “I live on an otherworld island. I’m going to lie down in my large room where I can see the lake.”

  “What the hell do you mean, outer words, other worlds?” Liam followed her into the house, past the triangular burn on the floor of the kitchen, through the parlour.

  “I mean … explanations.” And then, as if she were talking to herself, “Yes, that’s what I mean, explanations, interpretations.”

  Liam grabbed her shoulders and shook her almost roughly. “Tell me what’s happened,” he commanded now. “Eileen, tell me what’s happened to you.”

  But Molly came between them and put her arm gently round Eileen’s waist. “Leave her alone,” she said to Liam.

  As he watched the two women slowly climb the stairs, Liam heard his wife comforting his sister.

  “You’ve come home now,” she was saying. “I’ll look after you. Everything will be all right. You’ve come home now to stay.”

  AN old woman called Eileen saw something of herself in the puzzled eyes of a twelve-year-old girl. She had been watching the child for some time, waiting for the light, the wind, the position of the clouds to suggest when she should speak, when she should tell th
e story.

  “I see you out there on the beach,” Old Eileen said. “I see you, Esther, from my large room with its wonderful view of the lake. I am reminded of her.”

  The child Esther’s face was dusted with gold freckles. She wore a white dress. It was September and she had just returned from school. There were multiplication tables in her mind and the correct spelling of the word “tenacity,” but she wanted the pebbles at the edge of the shore and a boat to step into, which might carry her off. She turned in the room towards the corner where the old woman was standing, darkly dressed, looking like a shadow.

  “Who do you mean?” Esther asked.

  “Her,” Old Eileen replied. “My mother with skin as perfect as ice. She is nothing like your mother, Deirdre. Perhaps it skipped a generation.”

  The old woman went to sit straight-spined in an upright chair, and Esther remembered that when her father had once brought a rocking chair into the upstairs room Old Eileen dismissed it angrily. “The world is already askew,” she remembered her saying to him. “I hold still in my otherworld and let your world rock and tilt and veer. You of all people should know this,” she had said to Esther’s father, whose hand still rested on the wooden arm of the gift. “One of your houses was struck by lightning, the other buried by sand.”

  “When I die,” she told the twelve-year-old Esther now, “the room with the view of the lake will be yours. You have lived with calm parents in cataclysmic houses. I think those houses were trying to push you out – to push you out towards the lake.”

  “But we could always see the lake.”

  “That’s not good enough for the likes of you. The likes of you has to be on the beach, on the lake.” Old Eileen leaned forward in her chair, thrusting her face closer to the child who had been gradually approaching her, “Where is the centre of the world?” she abruptly demanded.

  Esther stood silently in front of her, holding onto a book she had forgotten to put on a table. She did not know the answer to the riddle.