If Michael had even once, in all the time they’ve been together, opened his arms with an offer of catching her, she’d have launched herself out into the abyss for him, happily or in tears but without a single backwards glance. Leaving Thomas seems so much a part of what they both want it clogs the aura of everything that has passed between them and passes still. And yet, it is simplifying the situation to an almost dismissive level. Because the move has never been hers alone to make. By dancing with him that first night, by meeting him again barely twelve hours later for a full-bore follow-up, by sharing everything she had going and everything he had, then and in the decades since, she’s already taken herself to the brink. But now, beyond, the great wide open waits.
As a dream, the notion of living together might glitter the way sea will in sunlight, but the reality, she knows, and maybe he knows too, would be thick with a lot more shadow. Yes, they’ve always longed for more, but not at the risk of sacrificing what’s been built. They both understand marriage as a concept and as a practice, with its need for certain pretence and its voids that separate each conceit. As things stand, they have always had the best of both worlds, best in terms of stability and comfort. Nice homes, lives that more or less make sense, a survival fuelled on denial and made bearable by meeting once a month to pleasure in lighting one another’s fuses, that four-week integer tried and tested to perfection in their game of lust, gap enough to hone the appetite to aching, to hold excitement at a dizzying height. And even now, after all this time and with the end looming, the possibility of promotion for Thomas and the move to Illinois still just a whisper but growing day by day in clarity and certainty, the sex still has passion, and occasionally, like echo blasts of earlier years, a kind of incandescence, and the talk is sweet, in its small restrictive ways confessional, and as obtusely open as a screaming embrace. What they have going is love. Caitlin has sworn this often to herself, believing it from the inside out, and it makes what they do at least worthwhile if not exactly right. It is love, unquestionably, but love in a rarefied situation, tempered and tuned.
If they only possessed the courage, they’d take hold of one another’s hands and jump, damning all consequence. The great wide open awaits, even now, rare with hope and possibility. But the time has already passed for leaps of faith. The world, too fast in spin, has slipped its moorings. Now they are merely hanging on, braced against a different kind of fall.
V
Leave-taking
After the dreams have come, the mornings feel like glass around him. Everything looks too bright, too well preserved. Michael’s way of coping is to sit at the kitchen table in silence and try to wait it out. The details of Inishbofin seem layered into the early hour, like an otherworldly second skin, and he fights against closing his eyes so he won’t have to acknowledge the faces that hang there, in that darkness, ready to loom, faces that will make him smile to see again but which will also bring deep sadness, because of how they’ve been lost and long since let go. The house is always still then, silent apart from the acceptable sounds, the clicking of pipes in the walls, water running at a murmur, the paper-weight of his own breath and Barbara’s as she idles about small chores, maybe rain against the glass or the crack of snow shifting its weight on the roof. While the coffee percolates, he sits and tries not to move or even think, knowing too well the traps and pitfalls that lie in those directions.
He likes to watch Barbara buttering toast. It’s a small thing, but it softens the solitude. She scrapes the slices with a knife, then cuts them into triangles. Her hands have always been delicate, gentle, yet she’s good with a knife. And knowing, too, because the angle of the cut seems to matter to the bread’s taste. It all goes beyond simple logic. At this stage of their lives, solidly middle-aged, they have dug their rut. On the surface, it’s not so bad. In a lit kitchen, Queens can be almost anywhere, and the missing things somehow count for less. The butter is a chemically correct shade of yellow and easily spread, but is actually a type of low-salt-content, sunflower-oil substitute. All along its packaging it boasts in outright lies about the remarkably comparable qualities of its taste. But butter and this stuff only look the same, and appearances will almost always deceive. And, in keeping with this trend, the bread is not real bread either, at least not Michael’s definition of real. Finger-thick slices the colour and flavour of dust, with an elasticity that bloats with every chew and which leaves grains of itself on his tongue and in his teeth even after swallowing. Lately, Barb has been pushing for a switch to one of those pro-biotic spreads. The change will make no great difference, since it is all just pseudo-magic anyway, and empty promises, and he’ll probably give in, but not yet, because he is stubborn. Healthy diets are all the rage, even among the dying, but he still holds out on a few of the details.
With his attention fixed on such minutiae, entire weeks, months even, can pass without him remembering when the song of the whole world was nothing but the rumble of late-returning boats and the gulls incessant in their screams against the whispering slop of Inishbofin’s tide. Or how it felt to stand at his father’s side out along the Fawnmore cliffs, knee-deep in the long grass among the scrub of pummelled furze, watching the sun of an August evening melt away as a redness in the west, slathering the ocean first to gold and then to such a damson state that it always seemed like an end to everything instead of merely the closing down of yet another day. The colours of that life remain tucked away inside him, but they exist as a second reality, one that feels better set to dreams.
New York is to blame for this. The girders and stone of the city make such shiftless truth of the here and now, the packed streets, the claustrophobic turmoil of its energy, the soft coaxing of its surfaces belying the hardness of what holds sway beneath. It is as if in accepting one world he cannot quite know the other, because each feels staggered by a distance of galaxies and nothing quite aligns. There are simply too many contradictions to allow a tandem coexistence. And of course, there is the erosion of time to contemplate.
His overwhelming sense, when waking from the old dreams, is generally one of displacement. The air holds all the wrong degrees of lucidity and nothing feels familiar, not the shape of his wife beside but apart from him in the bed or the garbled music weeping in low strains from the clock radio, not the prickling heat of the shower water against his face and body, not the kitchen in which he has sat and greeted decades’ worth of dawns. On such occasions, he moves with care, alive to his body’s discord, but it is only when he attempts to speak that he truly knows, truly understands. The words that come, the simple utterances towards a good morning, feel awkward and ill-fitting, and older words threaten the surface instead, some of the rasping Irish that goes in grunts and sighs and which he has not spoken in more than half a lifetime, except in small amusement or to indulge an occasional foray into nostalgia, but language as natural to him still as scratching an itch, gentle in story and shaped for knifing through and beneath the winds, shaped for translations of the heart. It is a cracked, ruinous dialect, plush and even amorous in its best moments, at other times scabrous as the flashes and outcroppings of shoreline reef that pock the Atlantic along his birthplace’s western front, but a working tongue borne of practicality and bearing little resemblance to the bookish language that they teach in schools nowadays. And evidently, despite the convolutions and splendours of his New York life, it has remained a significant part of who he is.
The problem, one of the many problems, is that the island he holds within himself feels like a lost place. Even upwards of a decade ago, when the telegram arrived announcing the death of Áine, his sister, from something bronchial, a curt three-line note that marked in official terms the severing of his final blood connection to that piece of rock, a good deal of the old life he’d known had already been rendered obsolete, swallowed up by the sweeps of sudden disposable Celtic Tiger wealth that had come pouring out of Dublin and the other boom cities and towns of the Irish mainland during the mid-nineties and the early two thousa
nds.
Time and the grab of money had succeeded in narrowing the span between shores of country and island to something inconsequential, especially during the months outside of winter, and a sea change had occurred. Tourists began to arrive, drawn by the glossy postcard images that represent all the unreality of misty dawns, quaint villages bathed in July hues and the brilliant cinnabar sunsets that burnish the placid Atlantic waters to the west. A trickle, initially, then hordes, backpackers happy with cultivated hardships, wallowing in the squalor of mud and simple fare, the boiled food, the peat fires. Always dressing against the weather and desperate to breathe the lost salt tinge of freedom, to be able to say that they stood a few minutes on a back road, or leaned against the bar in one of the pubs with a pint of stout in hand, chatting through the strains of fiddle music or above the whispers of the nearby tide with those who have lived this way for ever and who have known nothing more nor less of life than this. Spilling off the ferries in groups and families, from everywhere but mainly from Britain or the States, people who’ve made their choice to break this year from burned beaches and the centres of defined culture – Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Vienna, even Dublin – and to hunt instead for the authentic, the special something that they feel has been too long missing from their particular take on the world.
So Inishbofin flourishes, even as it loses something of itself. Progress, they call that, the ones who keep office hours in big cities and who need a word to justify the small devastations they inflict on time. Tourists bring money, and everyone needs that, because bartering has long since fallen out of fashion, and because the fish lessen in number with every passing year.
But that’s not the place he knows, and that knows him. To close his eyes is to return to an older world, and it’s all there, layers of it, soft memories coated in hard shells, pained moments that even now, after so long, have lost nothing of their ache.
It’s natural, of course, to reminisce, especially as a heart settles into middle age, and regret is a flavour familiar to anyone who has ever fled one life in the chase for another. Michael was sixteen when he left, and mired in some half-formed state between childhood and the ways of adults. Most of the time, he clings to this as his excuse. And, most of the time, it is enough. But the truth is that he’d already felt the loom of an end.
Some weeks prior to his going, they’d been down in the bottom field, laying out a turf rick, and the old man had straightened from a stoop, tossed down an armful of clods and gone to lean against the wall. His mouth hung open and his staring eyes shone dark against the waxy flats of his face. Weariness was part of it, but levels of exhaustion were facts of their lives and this was something more convoluted, something vampiric.
‘We’ll stop a while, boy,’ he said, once he felt certain of his breath. ‘Sure, there’s legs in the day yet.’
Michael stared, then averted his gaze, electing to consider instead the rash of cloud that cloaked without quite obliterating the colourless smudge of sun, and, when that didn’t feel like enough, the rough-cut chunks of turf which lay scattered around his boots. He felt a longing to sit, too, and the support of the stone wall looked inviting, but he allowed himself only a minute’s pause before bending again to the chore, knowing that the day would not end for them until the work did. He gathered up the bricks of turf, stacked them as he’d been shown so many times, laying them into place thick-side down, sod-side up so that the rick could waterproof itself over months’ worth of drying time. Working steadily and without much thought, focusing on nothing but the order of the job, focusing least of all on the ache that had sunk as a chill into the low of his back. Cold grey mud packed the folds of his neck and coated his hands like a leprous second skin, and he tasted and breathed it, feeling the sourness of its soupy grit between his back teeth whenever he clenched his jaw. There was no way to erase what he’d glimpsed, but island boys and men know well enough what fits the silence and what does not, and the shadow that greyed and blunted Seán seemed a harbinger, of sorts. His father did not die that day in the field, or even that year, but he did seem to skirt a brow of some hill around that time, because what followed was degrees of slow, meticulous disintegration.
That day, stacking the turf, Michael considered the old man’s blanched expression, the accepted horror within the downturned eyes, the mouth that sucked and bubbled like a stab wound, rabid for the cold refreshing air, and the image that stormed his mind was of his mother laid out in a lamplit bedroom, dead at barely thirty and looking as if she had never lived at all. An aneurysm of some sort, a sudden thunder crack that ripped her from the world and reduced her to that smoke-yellowed mannequin state, mute as space and stiffer than any bone, her raven hair unnaturally flat without the pull of wind to turn it feral, tendrils of fringe boxing in her broad forehead. Because he’d been so young, the details of that earlier time seem detached from one another and have to be stitched together with lines of logic. But he does remember that, after the sun went down, the house had quickly filled, and through most of the night people continued to arrive, women from all over the island carrying cakes or plates of cold sliced meat, men laden with dark unmarked bottles and jugs of stout or hauling sacks of pigs’ trotters that would be left to simmer for hours and soften to a state of almost unbelievable sweetness.
Initially, he’d had a place to sit, a piece of couch cushion that he was forced to share with Áine but which still afforded comfort. Then, as the space thinned, he was moved and resettled on the flagstones beside the empty fire and given no choice but to stand. Áine kept him at her side and held his hand, with their fingers tightly entwined. Her intent was to discourage thoughts of escape, but it was an unnecessary precaution. Fear kept him still, fear that was different from the anxiety he felt for strange soundings in the night or those things the darkness masked. Because this time the worst had already happened, and the aftermath lay before him as a hole in the world, gaping and immutable.
His mind that night of his mother’s wake was full of many things, but heaviest in his thoughts was a memory of something she had once said, months or a year earlier, her voice exasperated and yet full of compassion as she knelt before him to wrap a piece of cotton gauze around yet another of his badly skinned knees: ‘You know, Michael,’ she’d said, ‘if you don’t run so much, you won’t fall so much.’ Standing holding hands with Áine in that crowded living room, he let those words roll through his mind, and there was still a sense of calm to be had from the gentle remembered float of her voice. But from the little he’d glimpsed through the bedroom door, the previous night and again that morning, stillness seemed to him a far worse fate than falling. Surely there were times when the feel of all that chasing energy was more than worth the tumble, and the skinned knee. He didn’t fully understand what had happened but sensed enough to realise what death must mean, and it was the reverence that the word earned which made him feel so afraid. Beside him, Áine’s breathing had the thin, put-upon texture of shocked calm, and her fingers between his were cold and dry, as if some essence of who she was had retreated, taking all her heat with it. But he was glad of the touch, glad of the promised reassurance offered by skin against his skin. They stood there, breathing the good wintry aroma of the sweet-boiling trotters thickening the air and insinuating every pore, afraid to speak but watching the tide of faces that they knew well, neighbours bunched in groups, their cheeks reddened from whiskey, their mood sombre, especially as the light softened and was lost and the time came for lanterns to be lit. Each was sincere in his or her grief, but it was different for them, a passing thing. They were saddened that one of their own had been lost to them, but the equilibrium of their world at least held its level.
Across the room, ignored by everyone, Seán sat on the edge of a hard chair, head bowed, weeping. A strapping man, softened. Sometimes, when the packed bodies parted just enough, Michael could see his big shoulders heaving against the punch of tears, and whenever the murmured conversations hit a lull, the sound of his pain carried
throughout the house, forlorn as the lowing of something bestial across a span of valleys and fields. That weeping continued for hours, and through the terrible days that followed. It shook him and shook them all as they huddled together at the heart side of the sloping graveyard’s opened ground while rain lashed their faces, and it continued after they had returned home and were swallowed up once more into that small house’s dense gloom. But at some point it did soften and eventually it stopped altogether, to be replaced with the kind of silence that told its own story.
Glimpsed through a doorway left ajar, death for Michael is and will always be a curtained bedroom yellowed and set off-kilter by a burning lantern, and on the bed a face too still, known but no longer quite right, the muscles too relaxed, the shape pulled slack in every wrong direction. Calm, but too still. Once seen, it had felt a thing impossible to forget, or deny, yet somehow and for a long time he managed to succeed in doing both. But that day with his father in the field, the month or so before his leaving, there it was again. Not the same, but with enough similarity to make him remember. He stacked the turf, watched the old man with snatched glances, and thought of how things would be a year from now. And he began to think about running.
People die every day; the world is full of little voids. His mother had slipped from a living, breathing, laughing state to a still and yellowy husk, and part of the overgrown hillside, tucked beneath the winds and crooked stones. And not alone either, but there with her people, the old stock who lived and died before Michael’s time as well as the minutes’ worth of unnamed younger sister that he’d seen only as a dreamy blueness through a grey, threadbare bed sheet and in his mind, in the darkness, can sometimes see still. That hillside bulged, with his mother and the rest, but still the shadow roamed, insatiable, seeking and marking out, separating weaklings for the cull.
My Coney Island Baby Page 12
