“Yes, yes, of course.” He dismissed the small orphan, who trudged off disconsolate. Brother Madrigal turned from his desk toward the confiscation safe, then paused by the open window. “Who are those strange men on the lawn, waving torches?”
“I do not precisely know,” I said truthfully.
He frowned.
“They followed me home,” I felt moved to explain.
“And who could blame them?” said Brother Madrigal. He smiled and tousled my hair, before moving again toward the confiscation safe, tucked into the room’s rear left corner. From the lawn far below could be heard confused cries.
Unlocking the safe, he took out the letter and turned. Behind him, outside the window, I saw flames race along the dead ivy and creepers, and vanish up into the roof timbers. “Who,” he mused, looking at the envelope, “could be writing to you?” He started suddenly and looked up at me. “Of course!” he said. “Jude, it is your eighteenth birthday, is it not?”
I nodded.
He sighed, the tantalising letter now held disregarded in his right hand. “Jude…I have carried a secret this long time, regarding your birth. It is a secret known only to Brother Thomond and myself, and it has weighed heavy on us. I feel it is only right to tell you now. The secret of your birth…” He hesitated. “Is…” My heart clattered in its cage at this second chance. Brother Madrigal threw up his hands. “But where are my manners? Would you like a cup of tea first? And we must have music. Ah, music.”
He pressed play on the record player that sat at the left edge of the broad desk. The turntable bearing the orphanage single began to rotate at forty-five revolutions per minute. The tone-arm lifted, swung out, and dropped onto the broad opening groove of the record. The blunt needle juddered through the scratched groove. Faintly, beneath the crackle, could be heard traces of an ancient tune.
Brother Madrigal returned to the safe and switched on the old kettle that sat atop it. Leaving my letter leaning against the kettle, he came back to his desk and sat behind it in his old leather armchair. The rising roar of the old kettle and crackle of the record player disguised the rising roar and crackle of the flames in the dry timbers of the old tower roof.
Brother Madrigal patted the side of the record player affectionately. “The sound is so much warmer than from all these new digital doohickeys, don’t you find? And of course you can tell it is a good-quality machine from the way, when the needle hops free of the surface of the record, it often falls back into the self-same groove it has just left, with neither loss nor repetition of much music. The arm…” He tapped his nose and slowly closed one eye, “…is true.”
He dug out an Italia ’90 cup and a USA ’94 mug from his desk, and put a teabag in each.
“Milk?”
“No, thank you,” I said. The ceiling above him had begun to bulge down in a manner alarming to me. The old leaded roof had undoubtedly begun to collapse, and I feared my second and last link to my past would be crushed along with all my hopes.
“Very wise. Milk is fattening and thickens the phlegm,” said Brother Madrigal. “But you would like your letter, no doubt. And also…the secret of your birth.” He arose, his head almost brushing the bulge in the plaster, now yellowing from the intense heat of the blazing roof above it.
“Thirty years old, that record player,” said Brother Madrigal proudly, catching my glance at it. “And never had to replace the needle or the record. It came with a wonderful record. I really must turn it over one of these days,” he said, lifting the gently vibrating letter from alongside the rumbling kettle whose low tones, as it neared boiling, were lost in the bellow of flame above. “Have you any experience of turning records over, Jude?”
“No sir,” I said as he returned to the desk, my letter white against the black of his dress. Brother Madrigal extended the letter halfway across the table. I began to reach out for it. The envelope, containing perhaps the secret of my origin, brushed against my fingertips, electric with potential.
At that moment, with a crash, in a bravura finale of crackle, the record finished. The lifting mechanism hauled the tone arm up off the vinyl and returned it to its rest position with a sturdy click.
“Curious,” said Brother Madrigal, absentmindedly taking back the letter. “It is most unusual for the crackling to continue after the record has stopped.” He stood and moved to the record player.
The bulge in the ceiling gave a great lurch downward. Brother Madrigal turned, and looked up.
“Ah! There’s the problem!” he said. “A flood! Note the bulging ceiling! The water tank must have overflowed in the attic and the subsequent damp is causing a crackling in the circuits of the record player. Damp,” he touched his temple twice, “is the great enemy of the electrical circuit.”
He was by now required to shout on account of the great noise of the holocaust in the roof beams. Smoke began entering the room.
“Do you smell smoke?” he enquired. I replied that I did. “The damp has caused a short circuit,” he said, and nodded. “Just as I suspected.” He went to the corner of the room, where a fire axe rested in its glass-fronted wooden case. He removed axe from case and strode to beneath the bulge. “Nothing for it but to pierce it and relieve the pressure, or it’ll have the roof down.” He swung the axe up at the heart of the bulge.
A stream of molten lead from the roof poured over Brother Madrigal. The silver river flowed over axe and man, boiling his body while coating him in a thick sheet of still-bright lead that swiftly thickened and set as it ran down his upstretched arm, encasing his torso before solidifying in a thick base about his feet on the smoking carpet. Entirely covered, he shone under the electric light, axe aloft in his right hand, my letter smouldering and silvered in his left.
I snatched the last uncovered corner of the letter from his metal grasp, the heat-brittled triangle snapping off cleanly at the bright leaden boundary.
Snug in that little corner of envelope nestled a small triangle of yellowed paper.
My fingers tingled with dread and anticipation as they drew the scrap from its casing. Being the burnt corner of a single sheet, folded twice to form three rectangles of equal size, the scrap comprised a larger triangle of paper folded down the middle from apex to baseline, and a smaller, uncreased triangle of paper of the size and shape of its folded brother.
I regarded the small triangle.
Blank.
I turned it over.
Blank.
I unfolded and regarded the larger triangle.
Blank.
I turned it over, and read…
gents
anal
cruise.
I tilted it obliquely to catch the light, the better to reread it carefully:
gents
anal
cruise.
The secret of my origin was not entirely clear from the fragment, and the tower was beginning to collapse around me. I sighed, for I could not help but feel a certain disappointment in how my birthday had turned out. I left Brother Madrigal’s office as, behind me, the floorboards gave way beneath his lead-encased mass. I looked back to see him vanish down through successive floors of the tower.
I ran down the stairs. A breeze cooled my face as the fires above me sucked air up the stairwell, feeding the flames. Chaos was by now general and orphans and Brothers sprang from every door, laughing and exclaiming that Brother McGee had again lost control of his woodwork class.
The first members of the mob now pushed their way upstairs and, our lads not recognising the newcomers, fisticuffs ensued. I hesitated on the last landing. One member of the mob broke free of the mêlée and, seeing me, exclaimed, “There he is, boys!” He threw his hat at me and made a leap. I leapt sideways, through the nearest door, and entered Nurse’s quarters.
Nurse, the most attractive woman in the orphanage, and on whom we all had a crush, was absent, at her grandson’s wedding in Borris-in-Ossary. I felt it prudent to disguise myself from the mob, and slipped into a charming blue g
ingham dress. Only briefly paralysed by pleasure at the scent of her perfume, I soon made my way back out through the battle, as orphans and farmers knocked lumps out of each other.
“Foreigners!” shouted the farmers at the orphans.
“Foreigners!” shouted the orphans back, for some of the farmers were from as far away as Cloughjordan, Ballylusky, Ardcrony, Lofty Bog, and even far-off South Tipperary itself, as could be told by the sophistication of the stitching on the leather patches at the elbows of their tweed jackets and the richer, darker tones, redolent of the lush grasslands of the Suir Valley, of the cowshit on their Wellington boots.
“Dirty foreign bastards!”
“Fuck off back to Orphania!”
“Ardcrony ballocks!”
I saw the sophisticated farmer, who had seen Radiohead at Punchestown, hurled over the balcony and his body looted of its cigarettes by the infants.
The crowd parted to let me through, the young farmers removing their hats as I passed. The other orphans shouted, “It is Jude in a Dress!” But the sexual ambiguity of my name served me well on this occasion, as it helped the more doubtful farmers take me for an ill-favoured girl who usually wore slacks.
Escaping the crowd down the final stairs, I found myself once again in the deserted long corridor.
From far behind me came the confused sounds of the mob in fierce combat with the orphans and the Brothers of Jesus Christ Almighty. From far above me came the crack of expanding brick, a crackle of burning timber, sharp explosions of windowpanes in the blazing tower. My actions had led to the destruction of the orphanage. I had brought bitter disgrace to my family, whoever they should turn out to be.
I realised with a jolt that I would have to leave the place of my greatest happiness.
Ahead, dust and smoke gushed down through the ragged hole in the ceiling through which the lead-encased body of Brother Madrigal had earlier plunged. I gazed upon him, standing proudly erect on his thick metal base, holding his axe aloft, the whole of him shining like a freshly washed baked-bean tin in the light of the setting sun that shone along the corridor, through the open front door.
And by the front door, hanging from the coat hook in a more alert posture than his old bones had been able to manage in life, was Brother Thomond, the golden straw bursting from the neck and sleeves of his cassock. And in the doorway itself, hanged by his neck from a rope, my old friend Agamemnon, his thick head of golden hair fluffed up into a huge ruff by the noose, his tawny fur bristling as his dead tongue rolled from between his fierce, yellow teeth.
What was left for me here, now?
With a splintering crash and a flat, rumbling, bursting impact, the entire façade of the south tower detached itself, and fell in a long roll across the lawn and down the driveway, scattering warm bricks the length of the drive.
Dislodged by the lurch of the tower, the orphanage record player fell, tumbling three stories, through the holes made by Brother Madrigal and landed rightway up by his side with a smashing of innards.
The tone arm lurched onto the record on impact and, with a twang of elastic, the turntable began to rotate. Music sweet and pure filled the air and a sweet voice sang words I had only ever heard dimly.
“Some…
“Where…
“Oh…
“Werther…
“Aon…
“Bó…”
I filled to brimming with an ineffable emotion. I felt a great…presence? No, it was an absence, an absence of? Of…I could not name it. I wished I had someone to say goodbye to, to say goodbye to me.
The record ground to a slow halt with a crunching of broken gear-teeth.
I looked around me for the last time and sighed.
“There is no place like home,” I said quietly to nobody, and walked out the door onto the warm bricks in my blue dress. The heat came up through the soles of my shoes, so that I skipped nimbly along the warm yellow bricks, till they ended.
I looked back once, to see the broken wall, the burning roof and tower.
And Agamemnon dead.
[IRELAND: IRISH]
ORNA NÍ CHOILEÁIN
Camino
Ramón sat cross-legged on the wooden portico. He picked up a chunk of asphalt from the pile against the wall and started on the final shift of the afternoon. Some chunks he struck against each other to break them up. The remainder he had to whittle with a blunt tool. He threw the fragments into the tatty old basket beside him.
When the basket was full he would take it and empty its contents into the wheelbarrow. That full, he would make a longer trip up the mountain, where he would sell the pieces as filler to the developers. If he were fortunate, the crew would refill his wheelbarrow with additional large rocks. Usually, he had to do the work himself.
The bypass was well under way. On completion, the engineers would have no further need of Ramón’s labor. He would then need to find some other work in order to earn money for himself and for his aunt. There was no question of living off the contributions they received from the well-intentioned visitors who came to see her once in a while. Only the most desperate people would undertake the arduous trek to their home in the Andes.
He glanced over to the other side of the portico, where Espie sat in her rocking chair—asleep, he thought. Even blind as she was, her inner eyes saw far more than Ramón ever would.
She sensed his eyes on her. “The weather will turn,” Espie announced from her chair.
Ramón smiled. “I don’t need a clairvoyant to tell me that much.”
“Is your knee bothering you?” she asked, though she knew the answer.
“My knee aches, I ache all over, just as I always do when the weather is about to change. I don’t remember a dry spell lasting longer than this one. I suppose the rainy season will be fairly heavy when it comes, whenever that might be.”
Ten years before, Ramón, while working on the road, skidded and dropped through a deep, narrow gap in the undergrowth. There were no emergency rescue services nearby at that time, not even a telephone to raise the alarm. He lay in a hollow, semi-conscious for nine hours, until a rescue team came. His knee never healed properly. On account of the injury Ramón was unable to compete for work on the bypass with the other men downtown. On the bright side, he was in a position to keep his aunt company during the day.
“I’ll have to look for other work soon. The bypass will be finished before the rain comes, and the engineers will leave.”
Espie was not of the same opinion. “Folks have been saying for some time now that the weather is about to change, but here we are still waiting.”
Ramón knew what she meant. The weather had outstayed its welcome. Locals had been saying over and over that the dry season would surely end soon; that the rain would come the next week. In much the same way, the bypass had been “almost finished” for a number of years now.
This time however, the developers had the advantage of the long drought, and they really were approaching the end of the project. The workers endured the heat of the day to feed their families. They depended on one another. If rain did not come soon, there would be no crop to harvest. If there was no crop, they would have no work, and hence no food for their families.
Espie’s face was a sudden expression of anguish. “Are you in pain too?” Ramón asked worriedly. He rose to tend to her. She remained silent, and Ramón understood at once that a vision was taking place. The lines on her aged face grew deeper as she was drawn in.
While it did happen on occasion, Ramón was aware that it was unusual for visions to occur without some forewarning. Normally Espie would be given someone’s picture or a personal possession to interpret. Such items invoked thoughts, images, strong emotions, and she gave direction to her audience wherever possible.
Ramón stayed beside her until the vision faded. He did not ask what she saw. He never did. She would tell him if she wanted to tell.
Finally Espie let out a sigh, though there was always tension in her body. Ram�
�n raked his mind, in search of something to say. “It’s almost seven. I’ll go get the chocolates.”
Espie’s expression changed, she looked more relaxed and the worry receded from her face. “That would be nice,” she said.
Ramón rubbed his weathered hands on his faded jeans and limped into the kitchen, which also served as both their living room and sitting room. He opened the dresser and took out the small golden box of Belgian chocolates. Espie was intuitive, but she had not expected this dainty gift prior to receiving it last week.
Each chocolate had a different flavor. They were magical. Far better than the coca leaves Ramón would chew from time to time, if he needed to stay awake.
Outside, Ramón removed the green ribbon. He opened the cardboard. Three left. “Tía,” he called to his aunt, “There are three left. You have one now and we’ll each have one tomorrow night.” As he spoke, he saw the same dark shadow of distress draw across her face once more. Then, in the blink of an eye, all trace of it was gone. Perhaps it was nothing, Ramón thought, but a ray of sun dancing on her face.
Espie took a chocolate. Ramón returned to the kitchen without another word, where he tied a new bow in the ribbon as he had done every afternoon this week, and returned the box to the dresser for the last time. He went out to watch his aunt while she ate the chocolate. Sunlight glinted off the foil. The chocolate was already melting in the heat of the afternoon. Ramón’s thoughts lingered on the couple who had brought the box of chocolates to the house the week before. He wondered if they’d found what they were searching for.
Mrs. Nolan and her husband came to speak with Espie about their daughter Hayley, who had been missing for eight weeks. Ramón felt a piercing stab of pity for the couple when he saw them. They clutched one another fiercely, as though one might lose the other if they lessened their grip.
They had exhausted every possibility, searching for their daughter. The police had given up the investigation. The social worker told them that it was time for them to “move on,” that there was “every possibility that Hayley had just eloped to the continent with some boy.” The Nolans refused to accept this theory. Determination to discover the truth spurred them on to make the difficult journey across the world to speak with Espie in her kitchen.
Best European Fiction 2010 Page 16
