Antarctica

by Claire Keegan

  Strange, dream-like days followed. Grown men shook the boy’s hand, as if he too was a man. Women came into his mother’s house and made sandwiches and filled cups with tea and did the washing up and put the dishes back where they did not belong. People stood around drinking and smoking in the parlour, dragging dirt in on their shoes, on to his mother’s good sheepskin rug, saying what a fine woman she was. Was. People talking about his mother in the past tense, as if she was dead. But she was dead, the boy had to remind himself. His mother was dead.

  The boy found his father in the forge after the burial. He was standing there in his Sunday clothes, curving a red-hot iron bar, making hinges to hang a gate. A half-empty whiskey bottle was standing on the shelf where he kept the tools.

  ‘Well, son,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how we’ll manage now your mother’s gone.’

  When the boy didn’t answer, his father started pumping life into the fire with the bellows.

  The boy went outside and looked up at the stars. His mother had said the stars were angels looking down at them. His mother believed in God. People said his mother was in Heaven. He couldn’t go back inside. The house was full and empty at the same time. There were snowdrops she’d arranged in a vase, a shirt she’d ironed and left for him on a wooden hanger, her furry slippers under the armchair.

  The boy ran across the fields, left the track of his good shoes in the fresh clay. His heart was hammering, he was breathing hard, sweating, when he reached the cottage. The place was in a shambles. His grandmother was sitting in the rubble with a blanket around her shoulders, drinking brandy from a cup. Her hair was loose. She looked wild.

  ‘If you’d gone home when you were told,’ she said, ‘your mother would be alive today.’

  *

  His grandmother is smoking a lot today, stops every time they hang a strip to roll a cigarette. Her hands are shakier than usual. There’s a little trail of tobacco on the floor between the kitchen and his mother’s bedroom. The palm trees look queer and out of place on these walls. It was painted a plain custard-yellow before.

  The boy pastes the wall while his grandmother pastes the paper. Slap slap, say the brushes. The last strip won’t fit into the corner. The palm trees are crooked. When the boy slides them into place at the bottom, they overlap at the top. He cannot fix it. Wake me when you’re finished. He feels hot and cold at the same time. If you’d gone home when you were told. Tomorrow he must go back to school. She would have covered his books with wallpaper, inked his name on the collar of his new anorak. She would fry mashed potatoes, wash his lunch box and sign the exercise book to say he’d done his homework. She would ask him to go out and make sure the latch was on the gate, fill his hot water bottle and say ‘sleep tight’ at bedtime.

  The wallpapering is done. His grandmother is tidying up the last strip, cutting away the excess at the skirting board with a blade. Her hands are shaking, and the cut she makes is jagged. She sits down and rolls a cigarette. Tobacco falls into her lap. The boy strikes the match for her. It is getting on for dusk; light is draining from the day. The palm trees look like a storm has blown them sideways.

  ‘It’s crooked, Gran.’

  ‘No matter. Who’s to see?’ She is staring out the window at the wall.

  ‘We’ll make a bonfire.’ There’s fire in her eyes.

  They collect the scraps and rags and take them outside. She gets the oil can and the sprong from the shed and they collect all the rubbish, make a pile out front beside the wall. She douses broken ceiling boards with lamp oil and strikes the match. A blaze starts, smoke rises. Broken branches crackle in the heat; bark turns into white ash. This woodsmoke smells good. It stirs something ancient and necessary in the boy’s heart. He won’t go home. He will live here all winter, make fires and play cards and draw well-water and go to the shop. He will not leave his grandmother.

  She is pulling withered boughs out of the ditch, pitching them on the flames. She can’t get the fire big enough.

  Smoke drifts out across the wall, rouses the drowsy wasps in the fuchsia bushes at the far side of the road. Crows are circling in the sky. Caw. Caw. The Irish sound for where. Ca? Ca? they ask. Beyond the fire, the evening seems much darker; shadows are wrestling at their feet. His grandmother’s feet are big; his mother’s shoes wouldn’t fit her. He watches her lighting the cement bag in the fire. Something in his blood tells him what she’ll do. But he is stunned when she pitches it on the thatch.

  ‘Granny!’ He feels like laughing.

  ‘Stay there.’

  She goes inside. Windows open. She comes out carrying her good coat, her pension book, his mother’s wedding photo. She ignites a ribbon of lamp oil in the cottage. It doesn’t take long for the parlour curtains to catch fire. The wallpaper is burning, the palm trees are alight and the thatch is ablaze when the old woman takes the boy’s arm. They start walking, turn the bend. There is only one place to go. The boy faces it. Debris from the house, little bits of lighted straw, pieces of the past, are travelling through the air. The road is dark, too dark to see ahead. When they reach the old school, they stop and look back at the house burning in the valley. The dead pines at the gable end are blazing. A combine harvester’s headlights are moving through the wheat fields.

  ‘It’s a strange day for the harvest,’ the boy says, to break the silence. He can feel rain in the air: drizzle will soon fall.

  ‘Well, if they don’t do it now, they’ll never do it,’ his grandmother says, and leans on him all the way home.

  Passport Soup

  Frank Corso has come to expect nothing. He comes home late to an empty house without fire. Tonight he gathers kindling, lights the furnace and warms his hands. For supper he fries bacon and green tomatoes and lays a place for one. His wife is hardly ever home. When she is home, she is sitting on the veranda, staring out with expectation at the asphalt road, waiting for the phone to ring. Tonight her station wagon’s missing from the carport. She is probably driving along the highway, searching.

  He takes a carton from the refrigerator and fills a cup with milk. He butters a slice of rye bread and cuts his bacon into small pieces. It’s then he notices the photograph on the milk carton. It is a photograph of a young girl wearing dungarees. There is a gap at the front of her smile where she lost a tooth. MISSING, it reads in big, faint letters underneath. Elizabeth Corso, aged nine. Disappeared from her home outside Eugene, Oregon, on September 9th. Last seen wearing a red sweatshirt and blue jeans. If you have seen this person, please call … and a phone number for the police station that Frank Corso has long committed to memory.

  He remembers the night Elizabeth lost that tooth. He told her to put it under her pillow, said the tooth fairy would take it and leave a gift. He’d put a dollar bill under there after she fell asleep, but he forgot to take the tooth.

  ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ she’d said the next morning. ‘The tooth fairy came!’

  Frank Corso has lost his appetite. He pushes his plate aside and gets up and puts the milk carton with his daughter’s photograph back in the refrigerator and goes to bed. The sheets are cold. He hears a wedge of snow fall from the eaves of the roof on to the drift beneath the window. Snow falling, compounding cold. Daylight bleaches the bedroom walls before he finally sleeps.

  That was Monday.

  *

  On Tuesday, when he gets home, his wife’s station wagon is parked in the drive. She is in the girl’s room. He can hear her in there. She has wound up the music in the girl’s jewellery box. He knows she is sitting in there on the girl’s bed, watching the little plastic ballerina turning on its spring, tormenting herself. He pushes the door ajar and looks in. His wife stares right through him, past him, as if there is a picture behind him he is preventing her from seeing. He has become the invisible husband.

  ‘Hey,’ he says.

  He approaches, sits on the bed and puts his arm around her. She flings it off and picks up the jewellery box and walks out of the room. When Frank comes out to the den, he c
an see her sitting on the veranda, can hear the music, slowing as the spring loosens. Tonight he does not bother with supper. He takes a bottle of Scotch from the drinks cabinet into the bedroom with the newspaper. He reads every word, from the headlines through the sports to the obituaries, and then he goes into the en suite bathroom and sits on the toilet. When he looks up, hanging there on the wall is an enlarged photograph of his daughter that was not there before. It is a picture taken of her as flower girl at his sister-in-law’s wedding. She is wearing a white satin dress that comes down to her toes, satin-covered toes peeping out from underneath her dress. In her hands she holds a bouquet of white roses wreathed in Baby’s Breath. Frank Corso sits there on the toilet and puts his face in his hands and weeps.

  *

  On Wednesday when he comes home there’s no sign of her car, but the furnace is lighting and there’s a note that reads: ‘Gone to Maw’s. Be back soon.’ She has not left a note like that since before Elizabeth went missing. He takes heart in this note and takes a hot bath and puts on his dressing gown. He opens the door of the girl’s room. It is exactly as she left it. He looks into her closet, slides the wooden hangers to the left, then to the right. He remembers her wearing these clothes; at least he thinks he remembers. He sniffs the underarm of a yellow sweater: nothing. He takes a colouring book from a shelf and turns the pages; it is an old book from the time before she could keep the crayon inside the lines. Frank lies down on the bed and lifts the receiver of the Mickey Mouse telephone, wonders who he can call. There is nobody. People lost contact with him; nobody knew what to say. He puts the receiver down and listens to the icy wind hustling the trees outside the window. He thinks of Elsie being out in that. He hopes, if she is alive, that she is not out in that. He would rather his little girl was dead than be out in a night like tonight.

  ‘God forgive me,’ he says.

  He is standing in the cornfield where he lost her, looking for her, calling her name: Elsie! Elseeeeee! She is running, running down from the drown-deep river water’s edge, towards him. He can hear her breathing, the panting of a young girl. Then another voice comes from another direction, also calling her name. She turns back, away from her father, and follows the other voice. The man who owns this voice steps into view. A black stranger, who grips her hand. Her father shouts and tells her to stop, but she keeps walking away from him, away. He can see her footprints on the dry earth (it was a summer of drought warnings when she disappeared), and he hears his own voice becoming harsh, harsher. But she keeps walking. He can feel all the cells in his body bumping together, telling his brain to move, move, but he cannot. He watches her, listens to her feet and the stranger voicing promises; and then it all fades, becomes part of the silence beyond the cornfield and the river.

  Frank Corso wakes with a start in the dark of his daughter’s bedroom to the ringing of the telephone. He picks up the receiver, but no one speaks. It is his wife. He knows it is his wife. He can hear her, breathing, can feel her hatred travelling through the line, into the room.

  ‘Bad dreams?’ she says and hangs up. He hears her hanging up in the other room, on the other line. He gets up and goes back into what used to be their bedroom so she can lie down in what has become hers.

  Frank Corso lost his own child, in his own field at the back of his own house. Those are the facts. At one point in that late evening, she was there, and then she wasn’t. It was that simple, and that hard. The police came, detectives, who asked questions: Did you have an argument? Could you tell us once again, Mister Corso, exactly what happened? Take your time. These things happen. Their little black notebooks and cigarettes, suspicion. Frank giving the same unsatisfactory answers. Then the search party, neighbours walking every inch of those fields, through the rows of corn, the meadow and the grassland where the cattle grazed. It grew dark. Rows of torchlight crossed the land, shone into ditches, hedges, into the limbs of trees. But nobody shouted or ran or cried ‘We found her’. Not even the men in scuba gear who immersed themselves in water and dragged the river.

  When Frank Corso pulls his sheet back, there are photographs – twelve, fifteen, twenty-two photographs. Elsie sitting on his knee, Elsie at her grandmother’s, Elsie swinging in a rubber tyre, Elsie with her mother’s arms around her, sitting backwards on her pony, in Disneyland, blowing out birthday candles. He gathers the photographs carefully and puts them in the sock drawer and lies down.

  *

  On Thursday Frank does not come home. He leaves the office, gets a Chinese-to-go and books into a motel room on Airline Highway. He props himself up with pillows and eats with a plastic fork and watches TV. He flicks through the channels: a talk show with some guy who was dead for a while on the operating table, a documentary about the First World War, some woman talking about how to train your dogs to sit and fetch and heel. He settles for the war, watches till it’s over and then he thinks about leaving his wife. A big part of him wants to leave. The house feels like a morgue. All that blame and guilt and silence. Except for those two words – ‘bad dreams’ – last night, his wife has not addressed him since September. But there is a chance, a small, irretrievable chance that Elizabeth will come home and if she does, Frank will be there. She could be there now. She could have walked into the cold house with snow melting in her hair, asking where her daddy is. He dials the number; his wife picks up the phone.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Just called to say I’m staying out tonight. I was just wondering, you know, I was just wondering –’

  The line goes dead.

  *

  On Friday not only is the furnace hot when Frank comes home, but there’s a big pot of soup simmering on the hot-plate, warm bread in a basket on the table. He takes his coat off and shakes the snow off his pants, wipes his shoes on the mat. His wife is setting the table. Three forks, three knives, three soup spoons, cut-glass tumblers. Frank sits down and looks at her. She is all dressed up, wearing a blue evening dress, down to her toes. He’s seen it before, but he can’t say where. A string of glass beads hangs around her neck and dips down into the valley between her breasts. The ordeal has dimmed the lustre in her hair and she’s thinner now, but she’s still a handsome woman.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I made supper,’ she says. ‘How was your day?’

  He had almost forgotten the sound of her old voice.

  ‘Are you expecting company?’

  ‘How about a drink?’ she says. ‘I feel like a drink. How about you?’

  ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘I’ll –’

  ‘No!’ she says. ‘I’ll fix it. Why don’t you change?’

  He goes into the bedroom and loosens the knot in his tie, his shoe-laces. He changes into jogging pants, a turtleneck sweater, finds his slippers. He pulls back the duvet, but there are no photographs between the sheets. When he goes back out in the kitchen, his wife is taking warm soup bowls from the oven with a cloth. She hands him a tumbler of Wild Turkey with a napkin around the glass and turns off the overhead light. She puts a stick of butter out on a dish and takes a ladle from the drawer. She stands before him and takes the lid off. A thick, curling steam rises between them. She smiles. When she leans over to ladle out the soup, he looks down the front of her dress. Her breasts are straining against the lace. He takes a sip of whiskey. He feels like a husband again. Maybe everything will be alright. Maybe they can overcome this. Maybe they can have another child.

  ‘This smells good,’ he says, and reaches for his soup spoon once she’s seated. Then he looks into his bowl. He puts his spoon down. He starts counting, counts to nine. Floating on the surface of his soup are nine passportsized photographs of his missing daughter. Nine greasy, discoloured photographs. He pushes the bowl away and puts his head down on his arms.

  ‘Speciality of the house: passport soup,’ his wife says.

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘What’s the matter, Frank? Don’t you like it? You never did appreciate my cooking.’

 
Not until Frank throws the bowl of soup against the wall does her voice change, does she really start talking.

  ‘You bastard. Telling Elsie about fairies, making her believe in all that crap. You lost her, Frank, you lost her! You lost our child. You useless, son of a bitch!’

  She walks across the floor and slaps him, hard, with the back of her hand. Then she does it again. Frank gets down on his knees. He is kneeling before her. He holds on to the hem of her dress. Her dress is blue. He pinches the fabric between his fingers. He begs her forgiveness. She does not forgive him. She may never forgive him. She backs away. He hears blame, razor-sharp words flying like knives across the room, across his head. Words that cut him. She is tearing him asunder, putting the knife in; she is twisting the knife. Twisting. But Frank Corso feels better. It is a start. It is better than nothing.

  About the Author

  Claire Keegan was born in 1968 and grew up on a farm in Wicklow. Her first collection of short stories, Antarctica, was completed in 1998. It announced her as an exceptionally gifted and versatile writer of contemporary fiction and was awarded the Rooney Prize for Literature. Her second short story collection, Walk the Blue Fields, was published to enormous critical acclaim in 2007 and won her the 2008 Edge Hill Prize for Short Stories. Claire Keegan lives in County Wexford, Ireland.

  Copyright

  First published in 1999

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2013