by Neil Jordan
Then the freeze itself ends, with the mists and the white hoar-frost, and the bubbling spines of my library run with water. A proper Irish winter has set in. Rain is ever-present now, veils of it some days, torrents on others, and the ground beneath the copse of ash trees round the cottage becomes a swamp, with the plop and splash of water from the branches above. George’s door stays open, sagging on its hinges, and the radio finally dies under the gathering damp. The chestnut over the bend of the river grows a permanent sheen, indistinguishable from the brown swirls of the water below. The house drips from the roof, the ceilings, moss and lichen flourish on the garden walls. Schoolchildren run past the bleak facade at evening, fearing ghosts and muttering prayers, but gather in the grey mornings to throw stones. The windows crack, split and shatter, glass splinters littering the sodden carpets, and the winds come through, shaking loose the doors, the wardrobes, lifting the mouldering rugs in undulating waves, whipping the linens from their shaken drawers, through the windswept corridors, like ghosts themselves. The shattered windows reinforce the haunted mien of the grey limestone facade, the children scurrying by it faster, mouthing charms their mothers taught them, sharing tales of the presence inside, female of course, in white, carrying her head sometimes, her intestines others, in a gown of blood-streaked white but never, it seems, in an ageing fur coat, in Wellington boots and a black beret.
13
HESTER DIED ON a Saturday morning in September, mangled between the lathes of a threshing-machine, operated by the Bull Brennan in the fields that bordered the graveyard of the Protestant church in Termonfeckin. Her death was observed by Nina, George and Janie, sitting on the vibrating seat beside the rattling handles that were pushed and pulled by the gargantuan arms of the Bull, in an irregular rhythm and to a mysterious purpose, but one that kept the sheaves of barley trundling up the leather belt, grinding through the lathes, to be disgorged as yellow straw out of the right-hand funnel, chaff and barleycorn through the left. Dan Turnbull was shovelling the barley into sacks, five Brennan brothers were stacking the sheaves and Nina was staring at the leather conveyor belt, one long band of vibrating yellow on its way to the punishment of those wooden arms, like a mechanical hell constructed from giant versions of Miss Cannon’s ruler. She didn’t notice Hester slip, didn’t hear her hit the belt, and when she saw her pink cheeks and green and white bib and smock among the yellow sheaves, she didn’t cry out. She watched her with strange fascination make the shuddering journey up towards those threshing arms and was almost surprised to hear the panicked scream of George beside her.
“Hester!”
Dan looked up in mid-shovel, a halo of chaff around his saintly head. The Bull’s muscular arms pulled two levers contrariwise and the threshing-machine slowly, agonisingly, began to grind to a halt. But not before Hester had completed her juddering crawl towards those mechanical arms, received the mother of all thrashings, found her head wrenched one way, her torso the other. Dan listened to the whine and grind of the thresher in its death throes, and when it finally fell silent saw the pieces of pulverised head fall from the hopper into the waiting sack, its broken ears mingling with the ears of barley.
He removed the knotted handkerchief that protected his head from the midday sun and laid it in the grass beside the sack of barley. He picked the tiny pieces out one by one and placed them in it. He walked around the machine, past the line of sweating Brennan brothers, and retrieved what remained of Hester’s torso. He placed the pieces of shredded horsehair, bib and smock on the handkerchief beside the broken ceramic pieces of the head. He then took Nina from the Bull’s enormous hands and noticed, to his mild surprise, that she wasn’t crying. He lifted Janie next and last of all George, who was.
“Nobody’s fault,” Dan said and repeated it, “nobody’s fault.”
“Humpty Dumpty,” said Nina. “Had a big fall.”
“All the king’s horses,” said Dan. “All the king’s men.”
“Couldn’t put Humpty together again.”
“It’s not Humpty,” said George, “it’s Hester.”
“But she’s not gone,” said Nina, “is she, Dan?”
Dan stared at the shattered pieces of doll and scratched his remaining hairs.
“She’d take some fixin’,” he murmured.
“No, she won’t be fixed,” said Nina.
“But she can be waked,” said Janie.
“Now you’re talking,” says Dan. “Pipes, whiskey and porter.”
So Nina wrapped up Dan’s handkerchief, tying the four ends into a neat bow, picking up a broken piece of ash plant, inserting it into the bow and propping it on her shoulder, and began to walk across the stubbled barley field, for all the world like Dick Whittington. And they didn’t find pipes or porter, but they found a china tea-set, and George and Janie had orangeade and biscuits while Nina swung out over the river beneath the chestnut tree, and emptied the contents of Dan Turnbull’s handkerchief into the waters below.
“May she rest in peace,” said Nina.
“Amen,” said Janie.
“Amen,” repeated George.
“May she sleep the good sleep, may the river be her bed.”
“Amen,” repeated Janie and George.
“And when she dreams, may she dream only of us.”
“Dolls don’t dream,” said George.
“Hester does.”
“How can she dream when she’s dead?” asked Janie, for once wary of Nina’s logic.
“When the dead dream,” said Nina, “they dream of the living. If they’re good, like Hester, they become our guardian angels.”
“And if they’re bad?”
Nina thought for a moment, then shut her eyes, as if the prospect was too awful to contemplate. Then she opened them, and slowly, like a gathering wave, an expression of bliss flooded her face.
“What is it?” asked Janie, terrified by these transports.
“There,” said Nina, “over the water—”
“Where?” asked Georgie.
“Open your eyes,” said Nina, “her feet are in the rushes—”
“Who?” screamed Janie, her own eyes clamped.
“Hester,” Nina said, her voice somewhere between a breath and a prayer.
So she looks at me again, her only true familiar, and I realise again what a comfort it is, to be perceived. And I wonder was it me they waked with orangeade and biscuits, gave Hester as a name while the broken doll drifted, the ceramic cheeks descended slowly into silt, the shredded bib and smock, Puritan no more, drifted down towards Mozambique, got tangled in the bulrushes and the hair alone continued out towards the Lady’s Finger where it sank, eventually, down to meet the seaweed. Those eyes have said goodbye to childhood of a certain kind, to the whispered conversations with nothing in particular, the animation of the inanimate, the infinite present. They have a past now and memories, chief among them the memory of the broken doll, released from the knotted handkerchief, falling towards the water. They’re growing into a colder time, where minutes won’t last for ever but move, like serried stalks of barley, along a belt of sorts, leading to a particular end. Those eyes have no idea what that end will be, there’ll be a journey, that’s all they know, and on the journey a journeywoman called Hester, for want of a better name.
Three figures squatting beneath the chestnut tree, a miniature tablecloth spread out before them, miniature cups with orangeade and carefully broken biscuits. Two heads bowed, one head looking up with clear eyes, unafraid. Then George unclasps his bunched fist from his reddened eyes and looks up too. And he whispers, “Hester.”
And though my name is Nina, two clear and sunlit syllables, and Hester is sibilant, all breath and nightshade, I can’t complain, since any name is preferable to none.
II
14
AND THE HOUSE is now untouched by human hand. Children avoid the road at night and hurry past it in the morning, throw no more stones since every visible pane is broken. One night a fox comes through the sag
ging kitchen door, forages through the scullery for edibles, urinates on the piano-leg. I search him out. The yellow eyes, scouring for others in the shadows, that animal gaze, all instinct over sight, he pads in nightly, always more scraps to be found, more corners to forage in.
A vagrant pushes through the shattered window, cuts his arm on the broken glass, drinks the last sherry from the dining-room cabinet, sleeps on the damp, mouldy covers of my bed upstairs. A woman joins him, he rapes her on the kitchen floor, she flees, crying, bleeding. The police return, lead him off, place rusting padlocks on the gates, board up the broken doors and ground-floor windows. And the fox comes no more, there’s just the choughing of pigeons and at night the flutter of bats. And from the road, through padlocked gates glistening with spring rain, the haunted aspect is complete.
Then one March day when the rains have stopped and crocuses have pushed their orange noses through the overgrown grass, when the pale sun has defined itself through the veils of cloud, a car drives up to the gates, a hackney turns a key in the rusting padlock, drags them open, drives on up the weed-festered gravel, swings round to a halt in the abandoned courtyard. The back door opens and Gregory gets out.
Forever young, his hair has greyed, his cheeks have hollowed but the naivety of step is exactly as I remember, the shoulders bowed by nothing but the air. He pulls vainly at the nailed struts fastened to the kitchen door, then walks to the outhouse, vanishes inside. He emerges with a hammer, begins to pry the nails from the boards with a sickening shriek of old timber against rusted nail. The dull clatter of boards around his feet, then the door is free. He edges it open with an immaculate, Jermyn Street shoe.
He is late, as always. Three months at least this time, and I remember again, as the sunlight pierces the kitchen’s gloom, that there has been no funeral. Of course, no funeral, for a funeral needs a corpse and family, and my only family is here. He stands in the ravaged door-frame, filling it easily, one hand on the broken latch.
I can see him entering the same door when he was ten.
~
He was late then too, years late, the young Nina staring from the smaller doorway across the kitchen table with those wide, expectant eyes. Your brother is coming, they told her, or should we say your half-brother, and she wondered why they hadn’t told her before. There is a creature like you somewhere in the world although you haven’t met him yet. That slim pale boy standing in the doorway, case in one hand, the other in the hand of the hackney driver behind him. He had a nose for unkindness, she could tell that already, would smell it approaching at a hundred yards, climb into any cupboard to escape it, with his thick dark hair and the shadows in his cheeks like hers, mine. All that seemed different was his sex, male, and his eyes, green, they seemed to swallow the light—whatever little light there was in that kitchen, his eyes consumed it.
And the feeling she had, which I still cannot escape, which runs through the kitchen, ran through it instantaneously, like the sunlight, was of instant loss. She missed all the hours they hadn’t spent together, the history they hadn’t had, she wept inside for a past, for memories that had never existed. How can I remember you, never having known you? I could, we could, make it up, she tried to think; could invent a past, a book of hours for those nine years we hadn’t known each other. For Nina was nine then, when Gregory was ten. And when Nina was ten, Gregory would be eleven. And Nina was no more now and Gregory was fifty-two. We have a lifetime to catch up, she thought. But somehow, even then, she knew they wouldn’t. There would be a missing childhood between them, no games of catch-up, and whatever lifetime they had would be strangely, dangerously askew, like no other.
“What’s his name again?” she asked her mother, her mother who was not his, who was standing behind her, apparently casual, in the scullery corridor. She asked the question quietly, since she didn’t feel she had the right to address him as yet. But he heard, all the same.
“Gregory,” he said, and stepped inside.
~
He walks in now, through the broken crockery and the fox-droppings and the flutter of pigeon’s wings. He has either grieved his half-sister already or will never again grieve. He walks as if he’s being looked at—as indeed he is, solemnly, observantly—around the wet pine table through the low stone passage to the front hallway. He climbs the stairs and stops to listen to every ringing creak. He walks into my bedroom but doesn’t, of course, remember it as mine. It is his father’s, his new stepmother’s, who after his arrival rarely left it till after noon. He looks without expression at the wet, twisted coverlet where the fox and the rapist slept. He walks back into the corridor, opens the cupboard where once I told him, in a fit of malice, the dead Hester lived. He leaves the open door creaking and enters the room they chose to be his bedroom. I had kept, out of whimsy, want or some innate inability to change pertinent things, the same sturdy wooden bed he slept on, the same wallpaper with its boyish, sailboat pattern, the same photograph of him in cricket whites. He sits on the damp bed, looks at his younger self and smiles, grimly. He seems as foreign to his younger self then as he is to his younger sister, now.
“Nina,” he says softly, and I repeat the name so his voice echoes softly and comes back to him. He repeats it, “Nina, Nina,” louder, so my echo comes louder, and he looks at himself in the mottled mirror of the wardrobe. “Nina,” he says, and I am Echo again to his Narcissus and he lies on the bed and buries his face in the damp pillow.
There is a hint of sobbing in the air that must emanate from Echo, not Narcissus. Yes, I can hear sobbing but it is surely my own. Then he rises and his cheeks are damp so maybe the sobbing was his, but the pillow is damp with the mildew of three months, so maybe not. He walks back into the corridor, down the creaking stairs, and his Echo listens, catches each of his sounds, his footfalls, and throws them back. Then the piano makes its faltering sounds. The A and the D and the F and the D again, then the A an octave above. Echo gently doubles each slow, ponderous, broken note and recognises the piece, the Mozart Sonata in D. Three rapid trills. The B and the E and the G and the E and B above it. The playing grows surer, more forceful, and comes to full flood, no room for echo any more, like memory flooding back. The piano needs tuning, the pedals creak. But then, it always did.
~
She heard it the first night he came, and his playing of it seemed like a statement of kinds, a libation, a pouring out of what sounds he knew to the house, to his place within it. She was drawn from her room, quietly, down the carpeted stairs as the melody took flight. She stopped as the melody stopped, as he felt for a phrase and the melody tried to fly once more. Then it drew her again, to the curl of the banisters, where she could see him through the door, by the black, swanlike shape of the piano, his hands moving over the yellowing keys.
They hadn’t told her because they couldn’t, because they had no words. She understood that now, listening to the nameless music at the bottom of the stairs. And she understood the tension of the last month, the hushed voices in their bedroom at night, the sense of stilled argument, the frozen air in the kitchen at mealtimes.
“You have a brother,” her mother had said, walking her down before school to the gates to meet Janie and George. “Or should I say a half-brother. He lives in England and his name is Gregory.”
“Who is his mother?” she asked, with a wicked sense of hurt in the question.
“I haven’t met his mother, and your father hasn’t met his mother for a long, long time. But she’s sick, now, and she’s troubled and the boy is coming here.”
“Were they married,” she asked, “like you?” And she felt the hand let go of hers.
“No,” she said. “Before your father came here he was a painter. They lead funny lives.”
“Funny,” she repeated, then thought for a while. “What is a half-brother?” she asked.
“A half-brother,” her mother said carefully, “is when one parent is the same and one parent is not the same.”
“Can I have a full-brother, p
lease?” she asked, as she held her cheek up for the goodbye kiss.
“Perhaps,” said her mother, abstractedly. “Perhaps.”
She had tried to imagine him, this Pip, this Dick Whittington, this God-olphin Home, Ignobly born. She tried to imagine his clothes, his shoes, his complexion, his hands, his hair, his smell. She failed miserably. I have a brother, she scrawled on her slate at school, he has a different mother. There was a surprising poetry to the rhyme of those lines and she tried, having failed to imagine him, to imagine his mother. But she could hardly imagine his mother without imagining her father with her and felt oddly unfaithful imagining that. She pictured a woman by a twisting river, with a city behind it which she supposed was London. The woman was gazing at no-one in particular and the twisting river behind her was as if on a map, a map she then remembered she had seen, with pictures for the Houses of Parliament, for London Bridge, for Hyde Park. Where she had seen this map she had no idea, but the woman’s face in the foreground was nothing like the face she knew best of all, her mother’s. It was a thinner face with a different kind of sadness, with lank, blonde hair tied to one side. She imagined her father with this woman, walking through the oddly drawn streets of the map of London, past the fairytale towers of the Houses of Parliament, over the castellated entrance to Tower Bridge. She imagined her walking the same way her father walked, both absent-minded, the curling river behind them. She felt unaccountably sad then, and tried to think of her sick, in a large hospital ward, with a young boy by her side, a boy with a bag and a school blazer.
