by Neil Jordan
They rejoin the party, for party it has become, flushed with alcohol and a passion they imagine they can keep concealed. A song is reaching its conclusion, which warns of, or celebrates, “goodwill and hospitality, including false acquaintance.” And Janie starts up then, with an uncertain rendition of “The Girl from the County Down,” which she misremembers halfway through the second verse. “A noble call is mine,” she concludes as if she’d sung the whole of it. She spins the half-empty bottle of Powers on the carpet before her and manages to edge it with her toe so it ends up pointing at Buttsy. He rises to his feet and begins the first of seventeen verses of “The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill.” And Buttsy, unfortunately, remembers them all. The bottle spins again and elicits from the Moynihan sisters their party piece duet, “The Indian Love Call,” and from the aged Miss Cannon a word-perfect rendition of “Fair Daffodils, I Weep to See.”
So the living forget the dead, in an orgy of mnemonics. And later, much later in the night, while the persisting rain provides ample excuse for my wake’s continuance, while Gregory, downstairs, accompanies Jonathan in his bell-like, plangent account of “The Fair Maid of Perth,” Janie and Sergeant Buttsy Flanagan provide, upstairs on my virgin sheets, a display of the kind of acquaintance that would make the living blush and the dead rise up, if they only could.
50
THE RAINS COME down for days, the river rises, bursts its banks, the tributaries spill into one, not so much a river as a meandering lake, lapping right up to the remade glasshouse. The house sits beached on the Irish sea, the trees perched on the water’s surface like surprised seagulls. Kittiwakes tread on the sodden gravel by the kitchen door, the swing idles two feet under water, an eel winds itself between the ropes. The tides remove the topsoil, expose the septic tank to the brine, and the brick of the old Victorian orb collapses inwards like a crushed egg, the effluent merges effortlessly with the silt and the mud of Mozambique, releasing my maggot-riddled bones.
I’m part of it now, the horizon, that endless line that stretches from the glasshouse door to Wales and Liverpool. There are days, endless days when the sun rises, and before it has quite dispersed the morning mists, spreads its equatorial fingers through a tropical swamp, a bayou. And then it begins its slow retreat and drags me with it and I am the river now, the seaweed my hair, the barnacles my bed, the long slow womanly weight of water dragging me towards the house when the tide flows, away from it when it ebbs.
There are three of us here, one died by drowning, one died by falling, one died by garden shears. We burble sometimes, we lap, we sing. We pray for the living who move above us in ships, for the pilot that guides them, for the harbour that awaits them. For we know that some day they’ll have no more existence than us, than the tendrils of our hair on the river bed, moving with the tides, than the horse that wrecked the barley, than the petals of spring cherry that detach themselves from the tree in the monastery garden, drifting downwards towards the bald pate of the bearded Abbot, still sleeping, dreaming of them.
Acknowledgments
Grateful thanks to my mother, Angela Jordan, born in Mornington on the Boyne river, whose stories of her father, painter and sometime shellfish exporter, provided some kind of imaginative template; and to Jacintha McCullough, born in Baltray, nanny to my youngest children, whom I pestered with questions over a two-year period.
The following books proved invaluable in the writing of Shade: Kathleen Tynan, Twenty-Five Years Reminiscences (Smith, Elder & Co., 1913); Sir William Wilde, The Boyne and the Blackwater (Kevin Duffy, 2003); James Garry, The Streets and Lanes of Drogheda (Drogheda, 1993); John McCullen, The Drogheda Steampacket Co., in Journal of the Old Drogheda Society, 1994, No.9; Myles Dungan, Irish Voices from the Great War (Irish Academic Press, 1985); Robert Rhodes James, Gallipoli (B.T. Batsford, 1965); J.B. Lyons, The Enigma of Tom Kettle (Glendale Publishers, 1983); Alice Curtayne, Francis Ledwidge: A Life of the Poet (Martin Brian & O’Keefe Ltd., 1972); N.E.B. Wolters, Bungalow Town: Theatre and Film Colony (Shoreham, 1985); Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, vol. III: The Lure of Fantasy (Chatto & Windus, 1991).
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Neil Jordan is the author of three other novels—The Past, The Dream of a Beast, Sunrise with Sea Monster—and a short-story collection, Night in Tunisia. He is also the award-winning writer and director of such films as Mona Lisa, Interview with the Vampire, Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy, The End of the Affair, and The Crying Game, for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1993. He lives in Dublin.
