by Neil Jordan
“You didn’t have to join,” said Nina, staring at the glistening, slapping mackerel in the fishing-boat below.
“No,” said George, “but if I didn’t join I would have had to keep snagging turnips.”
There was a long-toothed conger eel twisting among the mackerel. A fisherman speared it with a gaff hook, chopped its tail off and then its head.
“I can’t imagine a war,” she said, watching the black blood spout over the ship’s deck, on to the mackerel below. “Can you, Gregory?”
“No,” he said, “it’s not my job is it, to imagine a war.”
His voice sounded adult to her, but when she turned and looked at his face, it seemed as young as ever.
“And who will look after you, Gregory, when you’re fighting this war?”
“Will you look after me, George?”
“I’ll look out for you. Don’t know I can look after you. Never fought a war.”
“Look out for each other,” said Nina, taking them both by the arms. There was a cold breeze now, coming in from the sea. “Will you promise me you’ll both come back?”
They ate grilled mackerel, a halfpenny each, down by the boats. Her question was rhetorical, or must have been, since neither of them answered. Gregory talked of the itching of his boots, the discomfort of his khaki trousers, George of the distributor cap on the motorbike engine. Gregory said the fight was for civilisation, George said he had heard it was for Poor Catholic Belgium and Nina found it hard to visualise any of it. It was as if there was a black pit in her facility for daydreaming, her imagination, and they were both descending into it, rapidly, on a motorcycle and sidecar.
When they tired of the pier and the sight of gasping mackerel, they mounted it again, George spurred it into action and they took a circuitous route home. He wanted to show them the tomb of the woman of the river.
They reached it at sunset and the motorcycle headlights threw a cone of sulphurous light on to the low circular hill and the phosphorescent cows in the field beyond. Gregory was out first, lifted her gallantly by the waist and deposited her on the soft earth. George lit a cigarette and laid his chin on his crossed hands over the handlebars and the softly purring engine. She took Gregory’s hand and walked towards the low hill at the dim end of the cone of light, surrounded by the oddly illumined Hereford cows. Their white patches gleamed against their patches of brown, vanishing into the gloom beyond, the last rays of the evening sun glancing around their nodding heads. Gregory’s long thin fingers seemed an extension of hers.
“He’s smitten,” he said, “and that’s why he’s going.”
“So it’s not the King’s shilling?” she asked.
“No,” he said, “it’s you, love.”
“Love,” she said, “you called me love, that’s not allowed.”
“With you then, Nina,” he said.
“But he’s Touchstone,” she told him, “and a Touchstone smitten by a Rosalind is a dramatic absurdity.”
“In a comedy,” said Gregory. “Maybe not in a tragedy.”
“Tragedy or comedy, Rosalind still loves Orlando.”
The yellow light on Gregory’s hair shimmered and she heard the low rumble behind her and realised George was gunning the motorbike slowly forwards, following.
“Are you talking about me?” he asked.
“No,” said Gregory, “we were talking about the difference between comedy and tragedy. People laugh in one and cry in the other.”
“And people live in one,” said George, “and die in the other.”
“So let’s make sure,” she said, “we make ours a comedy.”
“What does that mean?” asked George.
“It means you both come back.”
The round hill was now up against them and he spun his front wheel slowly, raking the arc of white over the patchy grass, the few bare thorn trees, a goat with raised horns staring back at them from what seemed to be the perfect arc of the hillside. And then she saw them. Two cantilevered blocks of stone supporting a transept on top, the circular whorls etched in them that seemed, in the harsh contrast of the headlights, to have been carved yesterday.
“What are they?” she asked.
“The entrance,” said George behind her.
“The entrance to what?”
“To her tomb.”
She walked through the grass which was dampening by now. A cow shuffled to her left, into the cone of light and out again. The goat stared from above, as if hypnotised. George moved the bike behind her till it illuminated a gloomy passageway, beyond the standing stones, inside the perfect hill.
“Whose tomb, George?”
“You know.”
“Tell me again.”
“The woman of the river.”
“Boinn.”
“We boil our tea in there, when it rains.”
“So this is Keiling’s farm?”
“Part of it. The vegetable part. Turnips, parsnips, potatoes.”
She tightened her hold on Gregory’s fingers, to draw him in. But he disengaged them.
“Coward,” she whispered.
“No,” he said. “I don’t belong in there.”
The stone passageway gleamed in the headlights, the whorled carvings on each side as if scratched by a giant child. Like George, she thought. Beyond it, a circular gloom. She walked inside and saw her huge shadow dancing ahead of her. Another shadow gained on hers and she felt his breath on her neck.
“So you belong after all,” she said and took his hand, and was shocked for a moment at the strength of it until she realised it was George’s. He held her hand hard, as if expecting a withdrawal.
“So Touchstone eats his vittles here?” she asked him, beginning again.
“When the rain comes down, when the potato drills turn into a swamp, when it’s hardly worth continuing. Which seems like every day. I sit here,” he said, “and think of you.”
They had reached a perfect half-circle, like a stone colander.
“Where,” she asked. “Where do you sit?”
“Here,” he told her and reached out for her in the dark, lifted her bodily and placed her on a stone with a small seat-like indentation.
“I can’t fit,” she said, “and if I can’t, I don’t see how you could.”
“They were smaller then,” he said.
“P or Q Celts?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know about Celts.”
“There’s one,” she said, “who doesn’t care about her P’s and Q’s.” She could see a woman, carved into the stone wall, her grinning face upturned and her knees pulled apart, her hands between them. “Is she doing what I think she’s doing?”
“What do you think she’s doing?” George asked, and there was a new tenderness in his voice.
“Touching herself,” she said, and drew her knees together.
“Why would she be doing that?” he asked.
“She’s an ancient Irish goddess and has a well between her legs.”
He withdrew his hand from her and she could see the large shape moving backwards.
“Don’t go yet,” she said.
“A well?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, “a well that gives birth to a river.” And she reached out and felt his calloused hand and drew it towards her.
“That still doesn’t tell me why she’s . . .” He stopped, as if he didn’t have the words for the stone hands on the wall carving.
“Maybe,” she said, and could feel the large hand on her knee now, “she has to help the river on its journey.”
“How so?” he asked, breathing hard.
“To make the water flow,” she said.
She could feel his hand, unstoppably travelling towards her now, and she opened her knees again and put her own hand over his and helped him on his journey. Why she was doing this she wasn’t sure, she wasn’t sure of anything, only that he and her half-brother would be gone soon to a darkness she couldn’t imagine, and the impuls
e felt strong, larger than her, larger than the woman on the wall who seemed to move her hands as George moved his and whose knee trembled as her knee trembled and it didn’t feel like stone, far from it, it felt like water, a trickle of it first and then a slow moving river that bent as she bent and shifted as she shifted, and shifting, that was the word she’d heard for it, did you shift him, yes I shifted and he shifted me. And he must have shifted her because the woman was nowhere to be seen, only the circular stone whorls of the ceiling, she was on the cold floor, George was above her and she gave a soft cry like the one the owl gave in the barn that night, among the upper hayricks.
She closed her eyes then and it was like sleeping, but it was not sleep, for she felt him moving from her and could hear his boots, scraping softly off the stone floor. Soon the scraping stopped and another scraping began, by the entrance.
“Sheila-na-gig,” he said.
She heard the voice, echoing in the cold, delicious ancientness of the tomb. She turned her head and saw Gregory walking towards her, silhouetted by the headlights near the entrance.
“Sheila what?” she asked softly. She drew her knees to her chin and adjusted her clothing. There was a damp patch near her bum.
He raised his arm so the shadow of his finger fell on the stone carving behind her. It traced the open mouthed head, the spread knees, the clutching hands.
“Sheila-na-gig. It’s a Celtic goddess. Disgraceful, don’t you think?”
“Is it?”
“But then what would I know. I’m not a Celt.”
“Where’s George?” she asked, rising.
“Isn’t he in here?”
“No. He left.”
“Well, he didn’t come out. I waited, you see. I waited for a long time, till my absence seemed beyond the bounds of . . . delicacy . . .”
“Is there another way out?” she asked. She smoothed her dress with her hands.
“But then is there anything delicate about Touchstone?”
“George,” she said. “His name is George.”
“And did you resolve the issue?” he asked. “Is it to be comedy or tragedy?”
Then the light shivered on them both and the motorcycle outside the tomb roared into life.
“There must be,” she said, “another way out.”
The light wheeled off them as the motorcycle turned, positioning its rear towards them as they exited. She noted the whorls of its tracks in the grass like the whorls in the stone lintel of the entrance. George sat with his back towards them, patiently, keeping the engine alive. She chose the sidecar for the journey home, leaving the pillion and the comfort of George’s waist to Gregory. They said little and the goat bleated from the top of the hill, as if to emphasise their silence.
The wind coursed through her hair on the journey home, as if the journey was one of air through her tresses, not through the glinting cottages of Slane, the dark streets of Drogheda, the moonlit low tide on the glittering wetlands. George wheeled to a halt in the gravel by their doorway and for some reason she hoped her mother was not up to greet her.
“Till tomorrow then, Private George,” said Gregory, dismounting.
“Goodnight Nina,” said George softly, as if Gregory didn’t exist.
She rose from the sidecar and kissed his dusty cheek, beneath the leather goggles. “Goodnight, George.”
Inside, the house was quiet. Her mother sat in the living room mixing a brandy and soda.
“You missed dinner,” she said.
“We had mackerel on the pier,” Nina answered, “in Clogherhead.” She heard the difference in her own voice and hoped, obscurely, that her mother couldn’t hear it. And, just as obscurely, she knew Gregory could. She walked through the hallway which seemed to shrink away from her, as if every angle, every plane, every parallel, bowed at her approach. She walked into the piano-room, with Gregory like a silent shadow behind her. She sat at the piano and began to play the Mozart, and when her memory of the Mozart failed, the bits of Schubert that she knew. Then her memory of the Schubert failed her in turn and she listened to the sound of the piano dying.
“I waited,” Gregory said.
“Did you?” she asked.
“Yes. I waited till it got too cold and I thought if you don’t come out I’m going, and I went to go in but heard something that made me think I shouldn’t.”
“Shouldn’t what?”
“Shouldn’t go in. Any further. But I could see your shadows on the wall, over the carvings. Then I walked back out.”
“Ah.”
“What? What does ah mean?”
“It means—Gregory, you’re crying.”
“I’m sorry—I feel—”
“How do you feel?”
“The way I felt when I came here first. When I saw you first.”
So she rose and put her arms around him and drew him down on to the small heart-shaped sofa and rested his head on the white skin between her neck and where her dress began, the dress that was still damp round the bottom, the white skin that would be brown in a few weeks, the first few weeks of real summer, and told him not to cry, reminded him of the days they had had, days on the white blowing sand, days round the tennis-court, days on the dunes, on the small canals of Mozambique.
“You don’t understand,” he said, “what you gave me was what I never had, you gave me a childhood and now it’s over.” And then her mother walked in.
What she saw was Gregory in Nina’s arms on the heart-shaped sofa, a child in everything but size, his lips on the delicate hollow beneath the nape of her neck. Her mother stopped momentarily in the doorway, her head to one side like a questioning bird. Her lipstick was smudged around the edges of her mouth in a way that gave her shock the appearance of a smile. An amused smile, as if a blemish had been exposed in a garment that she knew was flawed all along. She held the paper in one hand and a chewed pencil in another.
“Consecrate with oil?” she asked, with her mouth but hardly with her eyes.
“Anoint,” said Nina.
“Anoint,” she repeated. Then she scribbled in the clenched paper, her eyes darting from the crossword back to Gregory, now standing, his hand disengaging from Nina’s. “I think it’s probably best, after all, don’t you, Gregory?”
“What is best, Ma’am?” he asked.
“That you’ll be leaving soon. It’s an ill wind, as they say, a very ill wind. That blows no good.”
25
IN MABEL HATCH’S barn, I lay on the straw up near the top by the broken wooden wall looking out on the moonlit summer fields. And the hares danced, they definitely danced among the haystacks below. It had become the font of their going, their goodbyes, but I was alone there, enjoying my aloneness, wondering about that circular mound in Keiling’s field, that mons veneris where the stone woman tickled her own stone groin. I heard a footstep below me and saw a uniform walk in below me. “George?” I asked the uniform and the uniform answered “yes,” and this other George walked towards me, towards the uneven strawy steps the hayricks made, all on their own. He was lighter, this George, more delicate, more a Gregory than George, but Gregory needed to be George tonight, needed to be all that George had been, and this need added a solidity to his voice, added a weight to his step in the caked, straw-covered earth below.
“Is George coming up?” I asked.
“Does George normally come up?” he asked in turn.
“He does sometimes, sometimes he doesn’t, sometimes he’s up here and I come up to him.”
“Well then,” he said, “George is coming up to you now.”
And there were shadows everywhere but on the outside, outside that broken rectangle of wood, so all I could see was the uniform, the uniform shape and the promise of the man beneath, wearing it.
“George,” I said, “you’re late.”
“What time did I say?” he asked and I answered, “I don’t remember but whatever time, this wasn’t it.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“S
o you should be,” I said. “Sit down there now George, with your back against mine, I don’t want to see your face this time either.”
“This time,” he said, sitting down, “what about the last time?”
“The last time I didn’t see your face George, and you know why I didn’t want to see your face.”
“Tell me again,” he said, “why you didn’t want to see my face.”
“Because, you know, I wanted to imagine you were Gregory.”
“Why did you want to imagine George was Gregory?” he asked and I could feel the rough hairs of his uniform collar against my neck.
“Because then I could kiss you George, the way I would have kissed Gregory.”
“The way you would have kissed Gregory what?”
“The way I would have kissed Gregory if he had not been Gregory, if he had not been my half-brother, if he had been another called George.”
“Can you kiss and not see?” he asked softly.
“Yes,” I said, “if you close your eyes and turn your head a half-turn and reach your hand around to mine and bring it to yours.”
And he did that. And I felt his lips, the delicate ones, and his cheek, the downy cheek, and it was all like a membrane of water, any minute ready to burst.
“Can George do this, then?” he asked, and his hand travelled from my chin down my neck to the hem round my front.
“Did he or can he?” I asked.
“Did he?”
“He did and he can,” I said and it became like a game then, a game called Did George: did George do this, do this, do this, that and that. I said, “That’s what he did, just that, again that, but never so well, never so artfully. Are you remembering this, George?”
“Yes,” he said, “I know with certainty I will never forget this.”
“Good,” I said, “because it can never, ever happen again,” and the straw was around us now, if we wanted to be hidden we had ample means. The straw was under my arms, my knees, worrying the crack in my bum, the chaff in my mouth then, I ate it like manna, it was wet and dry at the same time, wet but left me thirsty, wet but left me dry somehow, and then I heard the owly cry again and listened for the beat of wings and then heard them, and opened my eyes in time to see the brown owl flying over him, above him, whose face I miraculously didn’t let myself see. And I turned my face away and saw through the broken beams the hayricks outside, the moon playing on them and the hares, the hares were gone and the taste of the chaff had turned dry and ashy, all of a sudden, inside my mouth. I felt the uniform retreat from me, slide itself back down the impromptu stairs the hayricks made, and wondered if the man inside it was crying the way I was.
