A Ghost in the Throat

by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

  Knock Knock.

  Who’s there?

  Back at my own clothesline, I think of those women. I arrange my body as they did: I look up. The clouds seem a flood, suspended far overhead. Our pasts are deep underwater. Our pasts are submerged in elsewheres.

  —

  Elsewhere, the years were turning Máire’s long hair grey, folding all her bright silk gowns into chests, closing the lids and turning the keys. Her frocks were replaced by a subdued costume Mrs O’Connell describes as ‘black silk, with white coif and kerchief, and plain cambric ruffles’. Modest, yes, but never less than elegant.

  In 1795, Máire died. She was keened by Alice, Eibhlín’s sister. Eibhlín would have been in her early fifties if she was present to watch her mother’s coffin cradled over the sands towards Abbey Island. There, sharp blades unlocked the deep door through which her husband’s body had moved decades before, and into that room of soil, Máire Ní Dhuibh’s body was lowered.

  Night fell.

  Night fell over all the footprints pressed into the strand.

  Night fell over the forest and the kitchen garden, over the stables and the mountain.

  Night fell over Máire’s roof, and night entered her home room by room, embracing all that was left of her life. Dark, her silver; dark, her keys; dark, her mirrors; dark, her cabinets; dark, her sons; dark, her daughters; and beyond their sleeping eyelids, all was dark, dark, dark.

  The gravestone arrived much later, with its inscription describing her as ‘a model for wives and mothers to admire and imitate’. I smiled the first time I ran my fingers over those stone words, but I do admire her, don’t you?

  I think again of Eibhlín, alone, her heels galloping her hearthstone. Below lies a mare’s skull, and in the orbits where eyes once moved, there is only dark.

  —

  When Mrs O’Connell visited Derrynane a century after Máire’s death, she set to cataloguing all the traces of her life that still resounded through those rooms. She thought Máire’s belongings ‘exempt from the mutabilities of time and fate’. She thought them invincible; she thought them safe. She was wrong.

  By the time I arrive, another hundred years have passed, and not only have all Máire’s objects vanished, but the rooms through which she once strode have been erased too. All that remains of the home Eibhlín Dubh was raised in is the series of extensions constructed during her famous nephew Daniel’s era, his home having been repurposed as a museum. When his home was first entrusted to the Irish State in the 1960s, Máire’s house was intact at the heart of the complex, but it was soon pronounced structurally unsound. Although Daniel’s rooms would be allowed to remain, officials decided that the older part of the house would be too expensive to save. The usual administrative routines were set in motion – the hands raised, the documents signed, and then, thud by violent thud, Máire’s rooms were obliterated.

  I stand within her old borders now, in the breezy gravel among the tourists and tour-guides, and try not to feel embarrassed as I let my eyelids fall. Like a prayer or a spell, I recite to myself the inventory of objects Mrs O’Connell documented here, all those belongings that Máire loved, her

  quaint old massive silver, the rare and beautiful oriental china, the rococo mirrors she smuggled, dark mahogany furniture she and her husband had made, beautiful brass scutcheons around keyholes, huge china punch bowl, blue and white fruit baskets, long handled silver spoon for stirring jam [that] was already in [its] 6th generation …

  The word scutcheon is new to me. My phone explains that in the eighteenth century, it referred both to the ornate metal panel surrounding a keyhole, and also to a marking behind a cow’s udder (known as the ‘milk mirror’, and once thought an indicator of the volume of milk a cow might produce). Máire’s brass scutcheons opened only to her keys. If each key of hers could be considered a word, her belted ring would have comprised an extraordinarily rare female text. Where is it?

  I let the gravel become a kitchen floor and make the room around me busy with women. I charm the air until it fills itself with steam, gossip, and the smell of warm bread. I let myself untether further until I can almost see beyond the hall and stairs and into another sunlit room. In the old parlour, my palms linger on an imagined windowsill. Within these walls, I have lifted puppet-strings until a breath flickered alive in the fireplace, setting three embers dancing again. I have beckoned dawn through these windows and set footsteps over its floorboards. I have arranged drapes to frame these windows just so, and settled chairs with neatly plumped cushions. I have hung a rococo mirror on the wall to reflect the candles as they were lit in the evenings, doubling their flicker-light.

  A mirror like Máire’s would have been born in a workshop abroad, in France, perhaps, where twin sheets of coarse glass would have been drawn against each other, separated only by a layer of water and sand, creating a friction that burnished both surfaces until they gleamed. Next, an interior layer of silvering, tin foil, and liquid mercury would have been applied, followed by polishing and bevelling. Born into its frame and bound in soft fabrics, it would have been lifted over depths of salt-rush and agitated sand, over dolphins and basking sharks, moving ever closer to Máire. When finally it was fixed to the wall at Derrynane, she would surely have smiled, seeing her own eyes reflected there for the first time. How precious such a mirror must have been when it first arrived, made so both by its elegance and by its rarity. Such an extravagance quickly became commonplace, however, as time brought mirrors to many other homes, until this object became an unremarkable word in the vocabulary of that room. By demolition, Máire’s mirror may have still been present, or it may already have become unfashionable by then, removed in favour of a more chic style. Maybe it had fallen, a splintering omen. If Máire’s mirror did smash to the floor of Derrynane, who might have been present to gather the seven years of ill-fortune that followed?

  I have sought out such mirrors on antiques websites, charmed by the intricacies of their gilt vines and blossoms. Antiques of this era are now so old that their frames are often displayed alone, their mirror-glass replaced by dark felt, conjuring an abyss where a reflected face would once have been. ‘O,’ such empty mirrors seem to say,

  O

  O shadow

  O iris

  O lost twin

  O darkness

  O, O, O.

  Mirrors speak a language of reflection and refraction through a continually shifting pattern of symmetries. See-saw, saw-she: at night, when Máire’s mirror dreams, she leaves the fidelity of glass behind and brings back old faces instead. The craftsman who birthed her. The boy who bound her in sacking. The maid with her spiralling cloth. Máire’s hum, the silver melody of keys keeping time with her steps: for-ev-er, for-ev-er. Mary lifting an apple from a blue-and-white basket. Nelly pausing to tuck a stray lock back in her braid. This is how the years pass in that mirror: soon, too soon. Someday, it, too, will be absent, and so will the room, but for now, they cling to each other. The mirror holds the dark room, and the room holds the dark mirror.

  —

  Beyond the gravel, a clutch of tourists are strolling between the gift shop and tea-rooms, plump as toddlers. I wish I could enjoy the pleasures of Derrynane as they seem to, but I can’t think of anything beyond Eibhlín Dubh. I recently received news that a book of mine, with a poem inspired by her life, has been given a literary award generous enough to help us put a down-payment on a house of our own. I can’t help but feel that Eibhlín Dubh had a hand in this achievement, and yet, I am so focused on finding her that I can’t celebrate. I envy these tourists their serenity, so I mimic them; I feign a smile like theirs and follow them through the museum, past the displays devoted to Daniel O’Connell, his plaques and his golden carriage, his many leather-bound books, even his death-bed, all immaculately preserved. A great man. O, a great man.

  I find a guide and ask after Máire, and then her daughters, to a nodding smile and the word ‘minor’. I start to scowl but catch myself and ask after
older artefacts instead: the mirrors, the china, and the scutcheons. When I ask after keys for doors that no longer exist, the guide’s smile falters at one corner, and once I begin to describe a particularly old jam spoon, the smile finally falls, and I am alone. I scour every one of those immaculate rooms for any remnant of the women I seek – a single button, say, a nib, a candlestick, or an earring – any trace at all of their existences. I find nothing.

  The last tourist bus leaves and the house quietens, letting each of the rooms settle once more into the particularity of its own silence. On the staircase, I dawdle, disheartened, my head leaning against the wall that once bordered the old house. I am tired. I knock – soft, soft – but where my knuckling might once have moved an echo through rooms on the other side, now, there is nothing. I should be on the road towards home already, I think, fumbling for my phone to check the time. From behind, a blare of sunlight leaps from the clouds, drawing my shadow on the wall, ink-black and inarticulate, a female body sketched by light. The clarity of this sudden reflection shakes me, and I stumble back, grasping for the balustrade. The shape dulls, then melts, fleeting and female, just as their shadows were. I continue to stare at the wall, willing it to return, longing to translate what it might mean, until I sense someone watching. From the foot of the stairs, the guide is peering up at me with something like sympathy. She must think me unstable, I realise, and she wouldn’t be wrong – what I consider an epiphany is simply my own shadow. I smile, shaking my head, as I thank her and thank her again. Hurrying away, I am still smiling to myself.

  My heels sing me from gravel to paving stones, into wet leaves, and then onto sparser winter grass. Another November-chill night is inching up from the ocean as my gaze rakes the ground, picking a cautious path through its slick murk. I don’t want to fall. From that dirt, something winks. Something pale and pointed. I kneel and scrape it up by fingernail. To my elation, I find that it is a fragment of delph, painted with a sliver of some delicate flower, a fragment of an old bowl, perhaps, a saucer or a teacup. It grins at me; I grin back. This was once part of a vessel from which steam rose to air, dissipated, then disappeared, a vessel that was often rubbed under warm suds until the day it slid from human grip to smash with a curse, this vessel whose fragments were quickly scooped up, slid into a bin, and flung on a rubbish heap. There, its splinters were cloaked in mud and rotting peelings, dispersed by years and by worms, through growth and frost and sun and snow, until this moment, when finally it chose to lift its face, giving itself to female hands once more. Little treasure. I rub it between my fingers and it grows warm. I translate it into a sign. Whether or not this fragment could be traced to Máire’s or Nelly’s hand doesn’t bother me. All that matters is that I am lifting an artefact symbolic of the female lives and thought and labour that belonged to this place. I hold this chunk in the heart of my hand, as gently as I hold every fragment I have found of Eibhlín Dubh’s life. Even in the half-light, it shines. I try to imagine extrapolating a whole from it, unbroken and vivid. Máire’s belongings may have disappeared, but in the island soil her teeth still grin, pearl-pale.

  —

  I have taken, of late, to seeking out flesh on the internet, opening incognito windows to swipe endless placentae in wonder and revulsion, in squirm and in awe. I scroll through them, so labyrinthine, so meaty, and wonder how my own flaws might have looked. This compulsive searching leads me to an article from the Smithsonian Institute on microchimerism. In pregnancy, I read, pluripotent cells from the foetus move through the placenta and enter the mother’s bloodstream. Within her body, they cling to tissues, mimicking the composition of surrounding cells, and there, they remain, long after the baby has left. A collection of such cells from subsequent siblings may be all stored within the mother simultaneously, each cluster coordinating and conflicting with a mother’s own bodily impulses. I think of Máire Ní Dhuibh, alone on the strand, her eye on the horizon, as her twin infants swim the ocean inside her. Even after both had grown and gone, she may have returned there, thinking of her daughters, far away in their own lives. Just as they remained in her thoughts, some of their cellular matter also remained in her body, vestigial, lingering.

  In her Caoineadh, although Eibhlín Dubh curses Mary’s husband and their children, she can’t bring herself to wish any ill on her twin –

  Only let no harm fall on Mary,

  and not for much sisterly love,

  but only that my own mother

  made her a first bed within her,

  where we shared three seasons together

  Eibhlín respected that red room still, the shared womb in which their twin placentas grew close, and so, she sheltered Mary from her curse. We presume to know so little of what occurs beyond or within us, whether of the lived past or of our unseen cellular mechanisms, and yet, at some level, we do instinctively understand something of these mysteries. Even as her twins raged at each other, fossils of their cells persisted within their mother’s body. Máire still held them both close.

  —

  I don’t push the fragment of delph back into its anonymous garden grave. I hold it tight, just as I hold every shard of information I’ve learned of Eibhlín Dubh. I close my fingers around it and run. I steal it.

  My car mirror is the only eye that recognises my thievery. As I drive, I think of Máire and her daughters’ reflected eyes, and I think of their lost mirror, but in my own, whose face do I see? Only me, only me. I can’t bear it.

  Swivelling it away, I catch the glare of the wet road instead, silver and grey as an unravelling braid. A convex seer, this rear-view mirror lets me peer into the landscape unwinding behind me, but it cannot show what is ahead, nor how I should turn next.

  14. now, then

  nó thairis dá dtaitneadh liom.

  … or beyond

  if I’d want.

  —Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill

  NOW

  For two-and-a-half years, the days and nights I have shared with my daughter all brim with milk. I have held her to my breast in airports and supermarkets, on beaches and buses, on footpaths and benches. I have fed her through waking and sleeping, through her fevers, teething, and tummy bugs, and through my own exhaustion, breast infections, mastitis fevers, and jammed ducts. She feeds. I feed. She sleeps. I ache.

  Even in my weariest moments, though, there remains a sort of merriness in feeling so useful. My right breast knows her needs intimately and fills them immediately. My left breast, however, still won’t work: lazy, brazen lump. From the moment that the skin of my girl-chest began to rise, the left nipple was inverted. Sullen, it never sang to a lover’s touch. Whereas my right breast is plump and industrious, the left dozes limply; milk has made of me a lopsided factory.

  In the bra-fitting rooms, a stranger shucks her tongue at my body. My right breast requires the substantial architecture of an E cup, the left a small B, a conundrum that represents an impossible arithmetic for any engineer of lingerie. I end up in what a younger version of myself might have mocked as a granny bra, unembellished white fabric stitched to tough, sturdy straps, adjusted until one breast is hoisted high while the other lolls in its voluminous cotton pocket. I take to wearing cardigans.

  For years, my sleep is broken by milk. Occasionally, as I’m tugged awake, I take comfort in imagining how often this precise moment has been enacted not only by my own body, but by other mothers, again and again and again, each a mirroring of the same elements – the milk, the mother, the baby, the dark, the milk, the mother, the baby, the dark, the milk, the milk, the milk – and in such moments, I am excruciatingly tired, yes, and yet, contentment hovers here too, shimmering in the peripheries, regardless of how tired I am. I am excruciatingly tired, yes, so tired that I frequently repeat myself, so very, very tired – and yet, I still procrastinate over whether to wean. To lure this child away from my body and train her hungers elsewhere would be to pull myself from my comfortable burrow of service. I can’t do it, the ritual of giving of myself to another is
so exquisite. I have made an invisibility of myself, neatly concealed in rooms made by female labour and repetition and milk.

  THEN

  As a girl, I thought I knew homemaking. By July, the gaps in the old stone walls around our house were bursting with weeds and wild strawberries, the grasses all beginnings, stretching tall and taller by the day. I was ten and free from school. I could feel the end of my childish amusements looming, but this summer, I told myself, I would delight in the joys of girlhood. I kicked off my boots and walked barefoot.

  Every summer, I had made myself a place of privacy in the grass, a nest where I could not be seen. My method was always the same – I chose a dip with care, then threw myself to my knees and gave my body to the land. I rolled with all my strength, spine to soil, belly to sky, then umbilical down and back to cloud, flinging myself side to side until I saw only sky and dirt and dirt and sky. I pressed my body into that place until it yielded to me, until I could feel the grass and weeds surrender and release all their seeds to the breeze, until I’d made a hollow that would be mine and mine alone. Call it a home. I pushed myself up on my elbows to admire my ceiling, where clutches of bumblebees stumbled by. The walls swayed. I made an invisibility of myself there, neatly concealed in a room made by female labour and repetition, an echo-imprint of my small existence. It felt like it belonged to me, that hollow, it felt new, and yet, as my body pressed into that ground, it also felt very old. There were others there too, unseen but present all around me.