by Neil Jordan
“Well, it smells like the fishmarket in Clerkenwell to me.”
Dan drew Garibaldi to a halt on the Quays and they got out and sure enough the air smelt of imminent rain and fish, and she wondered why she hadn’t smelt it before. And Father took his hand and Mamma took hers and they walked down Shop Street to Gallagher’s, where they replaced his overstitched jacket and his unevenly threaded trousers for smart new ones. Nina watched him with his hands held out while the Gallagher tailor marked his sleeves with chalk. She noted the fingers again, long and tapering, and when the jacket was back on the tailor’s dummy and the tailor was making adjustments, she took his hand and slipped him out of the side door, across the street, into the vast gloom of the cathedral.
“Do you pray?” he asked her.
“No,” she told him, “but I’m interested in martyrdoms.”
The cathedral seemed to whisper as they walked down the aisle but it was only, she noted, the murmur of prayers from the ladies bent over the wooden pews.
“You’re a Zoroastrian,” she said, again proud that she remembered each syllable.
“I didn’t say I was one. But I might be, some day.”
“Do Zoroastrians have martyrdoms?”
“I’m not sure what martyrdoms are.”
“Flayings,” she said, “quarterings, boilings and decapitations. Like there.” And she drew him towards the centre nave where under the glass casket the small shrivelled head lay.
“It’s black,” he said, “like a pygmy.”
“It’s only black,” she told him, “because it’s two hundred years old. And that’s why it’s shrivelled too. But the question you have to ask yourself is, if you were asked by Oliver Cromwell, do you believe in the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, and you knew they’d cut your head ofif if you said no, what answer would you give?”
“That sounds like a trick question,” he said, moving round the glass casket to get a better look. “I mean, does it matter what you believe once your head is cut off?”
“It does if you’re a martyr.”
“I thought if you’re a martyr your head was already cut ofif.”
“Clever clever,” she said, “I meant if you want to be a martyr.”
“I’m not sure I want to be a martyr,” he said.
So she led him back down the aisle and told him that if Miss Cannon asked him that question, his answer definitely was not the one to give.
They made it back to the draper’s when the last threads were being pulled from his new jacket.
“Where did you two get to?” her mother asked, and Nina saw that she avoided his eye.
“We went to the cathedral and said a prayer,” Nina lied, “didn’t we, Gregory?”
“We did,” said Gregory. “We gave thanks to God for my new family.”
Mother smiled tersely, caught his eye and looked away. Nina looked directly at him, hoping to catch him out in a smile, a giggle, an explosion of involuntary laughter. But Gregory returned her gaze with unsmiling lips, with expressionless green eyes, until his left eyelash fluttered down once, in a wink. And Nina returned his expressionless gaze and resolved to get him to teach her, as soon as possible, that fluttering wink.
George and Janie were waiting by the gates on the following Monday as she walked down with Gregory in his new jacket and trousers and his shiny shoes.
“This is Gregory, my brother,” Nina said grandly.
“You just got a brother?” George asked breathlessly. “How can you just get a brother?”
“He was posted from England, weren’t you, Gregory?”
And Gregory agreed, he had been sent from the depot for lost brothers via Royal Mail, arriving at our doorstep several days later.
“What’s it like to be posted?” George asked, while Janie tried to kick him into silence.
“The worst thing,” said Gregory, “is the taste of brown paper and the itching of the twine. Otherwise His Majesty’s postal service is a perfectly fine way to travel.”
Janie laughed then, unwillingly, and George laughed too, although in a way that revealed he didn’t really get the joke. “You’re a liar,” he said, “you weren’t posted.”
“I was,” said Gregory. “And to prove it, I still have the stamp in my pocket.” He reached into his pocket and Nina wondered how he was going to wriggle out of this one, but his hand came out with a stamp between two fingers, which he passed to George. George examined the stamp with forensic concentration as they walked between the hayricks towards Miss Cannon’s school. And once inside, as the class rose for prayers, Nina realised why Gregory would never have to face his martyrdom, when Miss Cannon excused him on the grounds that he was Protestant.
“C of E,” Gregory said. “It’s a different thing.”
“I think not,” said Miss Cannon, and so he sat while the class stood and sang their hymns to Mary.
“Why didn’t you say Zoroastrian?” Nina whispered through the hymn. He smiled up at her and hissed, “Because I haven’t decided.”
They took him to the mudflats of Mozambique after school, and surprised a heron in one of the stagnant pools. With his new shoes sinking in the browning mud, he seemed as exotic as that bird with its long neck and its dangling legs.
“Nobody is posted,” George said, returning to the theme, “I don’t believe you were posted.”
“I came by boat and train,” said Gregory, “but that’s the way the post travels, so I was posted in a way. Posted, but not wrapped.”
“Who posted you then?” asked George.
“My mother,” said Gregory, “licked a stamp and stuck it on my forehead and pinned the address to my coat.”
“What address?” asked Janie.
“My sister’s,” he said. “Nina’s.” And as it was the first time he had used the word sister, Nina felt an inordinate pleasure, a pleasure that seemed to creep up on her the way the mud oozed through her barefoot toes.
Mozambique proved to be inadequately mapped for him; the conceit of the nomenclature he found pleasing, but inordinately broad. If you have a Mozambique, he told them, you need a Zanzibar, you need a Congo, you need a Sudan, you need a Nile, a Kilimanjaro, a Sahara and an Indian Ocean beyond it. They already had a Sahara, they told him, and so he named the beating waves beyond the dunes of the Sahara the Indian Ocean, the two runnelled canals that bordered the mudflats he called the Nile and the Limpopo, and the stretch of scrub with the waist-high bushes became the Congo.
“Explorers,” he told George, “are quite specific about boundaries, and boundaries, once fixed, can never be altered.”
“So we’re explorers?” asked George, with all the tentative hesitation of one genuinely entering new territory.
“You can be an explorer or a native,” Gregory opined graciously. “It’s up to each individual.”
So George elected to be native, a choice he regretted when he learnt the lot of the native was to carry the goods and chattels of explorers and spent the rest of the afternoon burdened with four schoolbags, Janie’s, Nina’s, Gregory’s and of course his own.
“Is Cleopatra native?” Nina asked Gregory, since he had become a source of universal authority.
“Well now,” he sighed and stopped, and surveyed his vast and variegated kingdom.
“Cleopatra,” he said finally, “is a native queen and thus occupies a different category.”
“Fine,” said Nina, “then I’ll be Cleopatra.”
“You can’t,” he retorted, ever specific, “because we haven’t got an Egypt yet.”
“Yes we do,” she said, “how can you have a Nile without an Egypt, since the Nile runs into Egypt? So I’m Cleopatra and I’m going to look for Moses in the bulrushes on the banks of the Nile.”
So the boundaries that were to be fixed and never altered changed on an instant, and George found himself lumbered with an added burden, that of fanning Nina with a large dockleaf as she waded, dress held up above her knees, in her Nile, secure in the knowledge that her own fancy
could sometimes match that of her new half-brother’s.
16
YES, A GRAVE would have done the trick in a horror film. A funeral beforehand, plumed horses moving towards a misty graveyard. And that Gregory has come for a funeral, a funeral lacking its grave, becomes evident the next day as he drives up once more to the sunlit gates with Brid, Emer and Granny Moynihan. They have buckets and mops and bleach and floor polish and a vacuum cleaner, which rattles in the boot. They assault the house with a vengeance, and as Gregory retreats from the gathering clouds of dust, Granny Moynihan mutters through her whiskered lips, “She deserves a proper house for a proper funeral, God rest her soul.”
Brid Moynihan wipes the grime off a Moreau cupid, bought in Francis Street, Dublin, restored in Aungier Street, the sculpted glass flambeau long broken, replaced by a bare bulb and a Chinese shade. She talks as she cleans, a fractured litany of gossip, about the body not found, the brother returned, the scandal in the townland when he first arrived, how the mother, God rest her soul, was the one they pitied.
“No, the father,” retorts Emet, “a nicer man never walked the banks of that river, remembered kindly even now for the factory he built there, the employment he gave, they were the good days, of course, before all the trouble happened.”
“If he’s remembered that kindly,” counters Brid, “how come they burnt it down?”
“Blackguards,” mutters Granny, now and then.
“It was the times that was in it,” Emer returns, “they would have burnt a pigsty if they could have, burnt everything from England, except their coal. His only crime, after all, was being from there and living here, but then no-one in this house ever had a flitter of luck.”
And on that they’re both agreed, and Granny most of all. Luck was never at a premium here, and the thought must be a gossip stopper, since Granny quietly blesses herself as she begins on the piano, and Brid and Emer move in blessed silence from the Moreaus to the pictures lining the walls.
But the house doesn’t know it’s cursed or haunted or that it never had any luck. The house knows nothing. The house simply endures, accepts the clouds of frenetic dust Granny Moynihan is raising with her dutiful daughters. The brick is lifeless and comforting for that too, the wallpaper merely hangs, grown bubbled, yellow, mildewed, and accepts being brushed to some semblance of its former glory as readily as it departed from that glory. The silver on the mirrors, mottled with time, reflects dutifully the shapes of the living who brush it clean and even gaze at it fitfully, tucking the mousebrown hair behind the reddened ear as Emer does now, having moved from the dustfree picture frame.
I could grow fond of this quality, this absence of being, this sense of objects quite denuded of association, as in a random photograph. This placid emptiness of things. The blue satin curtains don’t resist when Granny Moynihan beats them with her duster, the greying paint on the woodwork doesn’t complain when washed back to its former cream.
And had I even wanted to buttress the Moynihans’ sense of the house as cursed or haunted, to topple that Japanese vase so it shattered on the marble fireplace, hear the silence descend, the questioning hushed and hurried—did you do that? I swear I didn’t, you must have brushed ofif it surely, I was over by the window Mammy, how could I have brushed off it, mother of God between us and all harm, didn’t I tell you—even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. My being is as still, as unmanifest as the old oak hunting table, shining now, like the crystal that sits on top of it. But I can take something like pleasure in this semblance of newness, this restoration of the things I placed here to the cleanliness that was their former state.
And the thought strikes me, if thoughts can strike something such as me, that that old oak table, bought at auction in the Grange Estate after old Mr. Huntingdon died, oval in shape, pitted with indentations of grain under the coats of varnish, that table has more substance than I have. It can gather dust and be swept free of dust, it can accept the weight of Emer’s rear upon it, as she sits on it for a rest, wipes her forehead and says, “Fag-break Mammy.”
“So what’s the story?” Emer asks, igniting a Sweet Afton with a match, inhaling deeply, words emerging with the smoke from her capacious lungs. “It’ll go to Gregory, won’t it, lock, stock and barrel? They were as thick as thieves always, the two of them, no room for third parties. Forget Janie, forget poor mad George who would have lain down and brayed among the hayricks to the full moon for her and probably did. Was there ever anyone else but her or him? There could be though, and now that I think about it, probably, is, a child somewhere.”
“What,” says Emer, “you mean his?”
“No,” says Brid, “hers. Like father like daughter. I mean no offence now, Mammy, but they don’t live like you or I.”
“Actresses?” asks Granny Moynihan.
“No,” says Emer, “Protestants.”
“She made her first communion with the lot of you,” says Granny.
“She may have worn the white dress and swallowed the host the body of Christ and all that, but that doesn’t make her Catholic. Only showed she didn’t care. All I’m saying is there may be a child in England, France, even America with some actor or producer boyo of a father. And if there is, that child’ll give Gregory a run for his money.”
“How?” yelps Brid, breathing smoke if not fire.
“On the inheritance front.”
“Well, if there is a child swimming round somewhere,” says Granny, “there’s nothing like an inheritance to bring them up for air. But if you ask me, they’d all be well shot of this place, child or no.”
My only child, though, was him.
~
“Don’t look now,” she told him, one afternoon in the piano room while he was practising his scales. “But she’s there.”
“Who?”
“Hester.”
And I am there, of course, always there, can see them both against the dark hulk of the instrument, the grey light of the window fleshing out their young figures. Gregory, dressed in trousers already too short for him. Nina, in a yellow cardigan and a green plaid skirt.
“The mirror.”
“Don’t tell fibs.”
“I’m not telling fibs. Never about her. Just do what you’re doing.”
“I’m doing scales.”
“Then keep doing scales. No. Come down here.” She squatted on all fours, crept beneath the piano legs. He seemed alone in the room for a moment, and terrified.
“Stop doing this.”
“Ill stop when you come down here.”
And he obeyed, of course, as he always did. Crept down, so close to her she could hear his heart beating.
“There,” she said, “watch. Her feet.”
And the wind blew the dust on the floor, a silken sheen of it, from the mirror to the piano stool. The pitifully fair hairs on his arms stood up.
“Don’t be frightened,” she says. “She’s a friend.”
“She’s nobody.”
“How could anybody be nobody?”
“You’re making this up.”
“Why would I make it up?”
“To frighten me. But I won’t be frightened.”
She felt the hairs on his thin arms, like sticklebacks. She clasped her hand around his.
“Shall I shut up about her then?”
“Please.”
“But wouldn’t you rather know what’s there?”
“There’s no-one there.”
“All right. There’s no-one there. Get out from under the piano then.”
“No.”
“Why not if there’s no-one there?”
“I like it here.” And his hand stayed in hers.
“All right,” he says, “I give up. She is there.”
“So?”
“So? Tell me about her.”
“Her name’s Hester.”
“You told me that. Tell me something different.”
“She wears a fur coat and a black hat.”
“So? It’s c
old wherever she is.”
“Is it cold here?”
“Not particularly.”
“So, she’s here and she’s not here . . .”
“Where would she be if she’s not here?”
“I don’t know. Home.”
“But surely this is her home?”
“Yes. Ghosts stay around when they die.”
“Where did she die?”
“Here. It has to be here. And there has to be a reason.”
“A reason for what?”
“A reason she’s a ghost. Why does one stay around and not the others?”
“Which others?”
“All the others who died.”
“It’d be too crowded.”
“Ha ha. No, she stays because she has something to tell us.”
“What?”
“I don’t know yet.”
His hand grew warmer in hers. “Can we stop this now?”
“No,” she said. “Not yet. Hester has a secret message to give you.”
“What message?”
“This one,” she said, and kissed him.
Under the piano, her lips touching his, I remember the boyish tautness of the mouth and the smell of surprise. The hairs on his arms all stood to attention. Like soldiers, like sheaves of wheat released from wind, like new-mown grass.
“Now,” she said, “we have the same ghost.”
So he agreed to Hester, he admitted her, came to acknowledge her, and once having done so, being the studious, bookish English boy he was, he had to find a history for her. From the Empire period he imagined, given her description of the waisted coat and the hat that was shaped like a bonnet, but not quite. And they played together, with histories of their ghost, the inevitably sad and tragic circumstances of its untimely demise. When one ran out of details, the other gladly filled in.
The ghost was young, of course, young enough to be beautiful, thin of waist and delicate in complexion, always on the run from some unwarranted doom. Running from what, he wondered. From the forces of the Crown, she said, triumphantly, relishing the burr of history in the phrase she didn’t fully understand. Lord Edward Fitzgerald, he decided, was the ghost’s sweetheart, if Regency indeed was the period. They had been disturbed, of course, in the love-seat below the curved window, doing sweetheart things, and she had run downstairs to distract their attention while out of the window and over the valleyed roofs he made his valiant escape. And many months later, after he had died of suspected suicide, an unwilling disembowelment with a rusty knife, she herself had leapt to join him from the window through which he had made his escape so valiant.
