My Coney Island Baby

by Billy O'Callaghan

  In a city like New York, in a city like Dublin, even, no one thinks this way, not like they can and frequently do in country places and on islands. In the cities, steel and stone are the tangibles, and death is just death, a fact of life and an end to things. No hoods, no scythes, no shadows, no capital letters. In the cities, stories are for the pages of books. Told sometimes to pleasure or to scare, but not believed, at least not to a level where belief gets to dictate. Neither ides nor omens for New York, London, Paris, Dublin, only facts. It has to do with different sets of freedoms.

  On those mornings after the dreams have come, Barbara brings coffee and sits with her back to the windows, facing the open kitchen door so that she can see through into the hallway. Always waiting for something, some news from afar, even if it’s just the morning paper. Sometimes she hums little snatches of whatever song she has woken with in her mind. And when the stillness becomes too much, she rises again, and switches on the radio. It is always the same, a grumbling of static, music jerking in and out of tune, and then either a news station or something gentle and innocuous, sixties and seventies hits, but with the volume kept low. They listen, finish their coffee and toast, then reach for bowls and the cereal. These days, they eat muesli. Eggs are high in cholesterol, and bacon has become like a swear word, but muesli is meant to be good for the heart, or the bowels, or something.

  The whole thing is a farce, shadow play. After the dreams have come and the bounds of time have been broken, what is gone feels far more immediate, more enlivened, than what tries to count as the here and now. And such mornings fill Michael with the sensation of having been cast adrift. He sips the coffee and quietly digests his breakfast, knowing that he properly belongs nowhere. As good as New York has been to him, he’ll never understand the city on a conspiratorial level. Because he was not born for these streets. Barbara, who is full of her own concerns, seems content in leaving him to his silence, but he knows that, were she to press for conversation, his words would come only and ever in Irish. This would probably amuse and then frighten her, and the thought of it frightens him too, because he senses that once he started there’d be no stopping, that it would be like splitting an artery. He chews the muesli and keeps his eyes open, inhaling with care because the bare stone walls of his father’s cottage feel suddenly only a breath away, the small kitchen window coated with the salt and grit of the sea wind and whistling draughts where the sealing putty has crusted and turned to powder. If he tries at all, he can feel the heavy wool of an old sweater across his back and shoulders, a thing passed down, the thick shape of it sagging around him several sizes too big, but its weight comforting against the bleak days, its odour filling his mouth with sooty, slightly gamey sweetness, a familiar taste that itches his tongue and lights a fire deep down in his throat. And when the wind catches just right in the eaves, it can pass, almost, for the high keening of Áine, deep in one of the ancient laments she so loved to sing, and it takes nothing at all to imagine her busying herself with collecting breakfast eggs from the small coop or struggling with a slopping pail of water from the communal pump at the bottom of the hill.

  Inishbofin is home, even still, but the connections to the place are too long lost, the damage irreparable. Seán dead and buried within a few years of Michael’s leaving, Áine also gone. There were the boys, her sons, his nephews, three of them, steps of stairs, but they are grown men now and have themselves long since abandoned the island. They have his address but none of them have kept in touch, as so often happens. They can’t be blamed. They don’t know him. He’s a name, that’s all, a nowhere man and a nobody. Someone they will have heard their mother mention, someone to look up if they ever happen to find themselves in New York, who can speak, if pressed, as they do and who will offer food and a bed, money, if needs be. He is nothing to their lives, but even though he only knows them from the flattened expressions of the photographs that Áine used to send every Christmas time without fail, they are, in a way, everything to him. Because they remain the last surviving links to his past, to who he was before he started trying so hard to be someone else.

  Caitlin loves listening to him speak of the island. He always feels an initial reluctance, even though the thoughts remain a constant part of who he is. But she knows what to say, and how to open him up. She has an image of Ireland already in her mind from the pictures she has seen and from her mother’s occasional stories, but Michael can give her stone and dirt, a sense of that world outside of poetry, musing about how he’d like to go back, some day, just to see the place again. Just to reconnect with all that he has lost and left behind. His craving to return is tempered by the knowledge that Inishbofin holds nothing for him any more, nothing beyond the simply nostalgic, but there is comfort to be had from wishing. And halving his memories with someone who actually wants to hear, who wants to be able to taste and feel what he already knows, makes all the difference. On some level, they both understand that this is nothing more than talk, of the sort that lovers often share in an effort to compensate for all that must remain missing between them, and to play up to the delusion that what they have together is something more substantial than the facts might otherwise suggest. But for her, most of the time, it is enough, because his voice becomes imbued with a melancholy that allows for another and particular kind of intimacy, a deep uncovering of who he is or once was. It’s a sharing of dreams, and when the subject breaks the surface, she nestles against him in bed, inclines her head so that her forehead can feel the brush of his unshaven cheeks, and prompts him with little sounds from the low part of her throat, urging him on.

  He remembers a day when they had even spoken of going together. Fantasy, of course, and impossible from the first suggested word, but a nice idea to play with for a while. That day feels close, too, the way so much of the past does, another bitter winter’s afternoon somewhere in the height of summer, years gone now yet still alive somehow, still delicious in its details. They’ve known a lot of such afternoons together, and this one – whenever it was – is another of those that have become tangled in some universal cog and now plays out endlessly, just beneath the skin of usual daily living. Reach out in the right direction and it’s there, just one of the hundreds, a sigh or a gasp away.

  With the least effort, he can feel again the lunchtime hour, and the hard-starched linen sheets of yet another strange bed as they came together, filling one another’s arms in the aftermath moments of what they’d really come here to do, but holding her body tightly to his own so that their feet lay tangled and their hips and shoulders touched, and describing in drowsy whispers the winters that shaped his childhood. Everything else changes but seasons only shift, and winters now can only ever know the colours and weight of all those that have gone before. Days when the wind hit gale force and waves lashed the western shore with enough violence to send the roars of war clear across the island, and there was nothing left to do except get inside and either perch by the window to watch the sweeps of rain blotting the landscape or else pull a chair in close to the fire and try to find comfort in how the small heroic colours of the flames raged in combat against the chimney’s gloom. Winter kept the boats anchored off the pier, those that had a choice in the matter, and brought the sort of weather that turned the hours ripe for stories and recollections.

  Tourism has undoubtedly shifted the island’s inner equilibrium, but because of his early desertion the Inishbofin of his childhood remains preserved, with the home-place winters enduring most vividly, and it is these that he finds himself missing most of all. Because as good as summers are to little boys so full of running, and as beautiful, wild and tormented, Inishbofin at that time of year always had less about it, somehow, less to mark it out as distinct from the rest of the world. At least on a scale of any magnitude. The summers were days of glory, the mornings spent out along the beaches, paddling up to his knees in the cold blue foamy water, leaving his clothes on to swim or else stripping completely naked so that he could feel the sun all over his body
and the grubby cling of the salt and the wet sand against his skin. Or flinging ancient serpentine hand grenades overarm out into the tide in defence against imagined invaders, or playing hiding games of Pirate in the shallow inlet caves. When his heart had pounded its fill, gathering whelks and cockles from among the rocks for Áine to boil in peppery milk and to serve as lunch with soda bread still warm from the early bake. And when enough heat had infiltrated the day and the salted air began to crackle, using the hours until evening either catching frogs or plundering nests, settling mostly for the cream and speckled sandpiper eggs laid down like bowled stones in the grassy verges of the higher ground out along Knock Head, but living really for the lucky days of certain shine, when everything fell right and he’d chance searching for the corncrake’s greenish-grey fool’s gold treasury hidden and waiting waist-deep in the hay fields with harvest-time drawing near. Those were the clotted facts of the high season and the rhythms of a slamming heart, but if they live on as perfect days in memory then they are also too pure, too distilled. And in the same way that hurt lingers as long or longer than laughter, it is the more visceral winter memories, all raw edges, that continue to captivate his senses. The hard stones of rain in his face, the cold smoking magic, the cleave of the wind and the constant savagery of the ground beneath his feet. Summers were for smiling, but winters held the attention of more serious considerations. Winters, with their heavy seas and their evening murk always whitening and smothering the daylight hours, drew in the edges of the world and made the existence of the old gods seem possible again.

  He understands that, if he were to go back now, or five or ten years from now, the winters probably would retain at least some of their gloriously cruel physical aspects, the gales still chasing in hard to lash the shoreline and the fields, the roads still masked in bitter mist and silent as stone of passers-by, and the men who fish still giving their attentions to the piling of the storm cloud before venturing out anyway, knowing too few alternatives. But despite the unchanging details, something would be different, at a physical or psychological level, because the island has opened up, and circumstances have suffered the beneficial traumas of influx and money, new people, new ideas, new ways of life. Inishbofin will have found a new reality, one in which he’d no longer quite fit.

  The idea of them making a shared trip has always been a thing to say, part of the game.

  ‘So, it’s settled then?’ Caitlin said, that winter’s afternoon back in, what – the early nineties? As if it were simply a matter of deciding.

  He remembers laughing. ‘What will Thomas say? Or Barbara?’

  But she’d only pressed him with her smile.

  ‘Don’t worry about them. I’ll come up with a story, concoct a great-aunt or something. I’m a writer. I’m paid to deceive.’

  ‘Of course. Sorry.’

  ‘At least, I was, for about five minutes, once upon a time. But I’d back myself to still be able, when needs must. And you’re easy. Travel is part of your programme anyway. So, a selling trip. Chicago, say. Or Seattle. A whistle-stop tour. Five, six towns in as many nights. And just think of it. We’d have a whole week to ourselves. Just like real people. Like a real couple. And you can give me the guided tour, even though I feel like I know the place already, from all the years of listening to you talk. And because I know you.’

  ‘You have it all figured out.’

  ‘Just say you’ll think about it. Please, Mike.’

  ‘I’m thinking about it now,’ he told her, smirking so that the words took on a wider meaning, and she coughed a little laughter even through his closing kiss.

  Only in the intimacy of an illicit bed could there have been any chance, however slim, of their going. In a bed rented by the hour and where and when everything said, done and thought was a thoroughgoing lie anyway, or at least a fantasy. The tip of her tongue trawled the crater of his upper lip, and he realised yet again that he’d never known such a magnitude of sharing, both bodily and of the soul, with anyone else.

  His throat felt thick with an old thought, but it caught on a heavy sigh and was smashed to pieces of its worth. Tá grá agam duit; words that he had never before spoken, not to anyone, not even to those who’d have been in desperate need of hearing them said. I love you. That afternoon, though, he closed his eyes and spoke, whispered, and the sentiment, without translation, hung almost shapeless between them, flushed by air of its edges, and so much the better for that. Caitlin stretched her body into his and smiled, at him and at something deep inside herself, and misreading his words as mere sound, let them slip away.

  That last night before his leaving, a gulf already lay vast and empty between father and son, fathoms of silence pinning them down while the turf in the fireplace burned shades of fox-fur and rose hip. The old man was probably mid-fifties then, certainly no more than that, an age not terribly much in numbers but one which lay heavy on frame and face. The firelight brightened surfaces, and the lines that creased his brow and cheeks seemed cut with such severe definition that every shift for breath and considered thought announced itself anew. His eyes held the void and looked big and heavy in their trance, and his hair, usually the colour of week-old snow, had become again the muddy, summer-night red of better times.

  Fifty here could be old, with the days and nights mounted hard, one upon the next. In the fields or out on the water through the heavy months, with the westerly ocean wind lacing fatigue into backs and shoulders and with the low seething skies that brought rain clouds in rafts set so barely apart that all the world but rock was breaths of green, even the best of men were broken into compliance. Like most of the islanders, Seán lived for the dark, loamy earth and, on the off-days, the ocean. Working a small boat that he and his brother, Tadhg, had inherited from their father, timing the shoals, keeping to the areas of water known without need of charts, harvesting the mackerel when they came and the herring that had been so plentiful before the Spanish and Scandinavian trawlers took to working the international line. Tadhg, six years the senior, had been overboard twice in storms and sometimes wept when it rained. His second time over had seen him nine hours in the water and presumed lost, and the salt had so corroded his vocal cords that speaking hurt him for years afterwards. In the boat, he kept a three-foot slab of driftwood always within easy reach, preferring that to a life jacket, trusting the natural buoyancy of the wood over anything man-made. Survival for Seán and Tadhg and their kind was earned by days on the water and longer ones, slavish hours in every weather, bound to a piece of land, a few rock-strewn acres that offered frugal security but demanded devotion. Seán gave the years of his life to one and the other, and he met the nights, especially after his wife’s passing, famished for a plate of whatever Áine served up, fish or mutton stew, and afterwards a glass or two of something that would settle him with his thoughts beside the fire, whiskey on special occasions, more usually porter or the illegal sheer-proof poitín that found its way up out of the island’s hidden places, distilled from potatoes and barley and concealed in old unmarked milk bottles. ‘A taste,’ he’d say, to hide any embarrassment, having accidentally broken into song, ‘just to keep the badness out.’ And he’d smile then at Áine or at Michael with all the melancholy in his heart and explain that there was nothing like the poitín for warding off colds, and sometimes he’d draw them near and let them indulge in a little sip, just so that he could pleasure in their exaggerated reactions. But he was always careful to heed his own limit, the second glass, except if they happened to be entertaining a visitor or if it was some better juice on the go, at Christmas time, New Year’s, or some such night worthy of the marking.

  At the fireside, Michael drained his second glass and felt the life of the whiskey on his tongue and then a sense of loss as its heat began to fade. His father reached again for the bottle.

  ‘Not for me, Dad. I’ve an early start in the morning.’

  ‘You can have one more, boy. Sure you’ll be gone long enough. Hold up your glass.’


  He hesitated, then lifted his glass towards the waiting bottle. The whiskey had done something, had slackened him, and the chair now wanted all his weight. He felt the weariness hanging from his body like a soaked coat. He waited through the pouring, then sat back and, just for a second, closed his eyes.

  When he met the room again, new life had come into the fire, gouts of yellow that burned like a bright heart inside the night. Twenty years later, lying naked in that anonymous hotel bed and recalling for the first time with anyone those moments of leave-taking, he’ll open his eyes to the exact inverse of this sensation, to a room bleeding out of its afternoon light, the whiteness greying and growing mute. Even as the days themselves fade like footsteps in sand, memories hold frozen. And even as the light begins to die, he’ll reach out for Caitlin, desperate to catch the details before they shift. He’ll notice everything then: the moist gleam that her tongue leaves across her lower lip; her thin forearms veiled in a down fine and shining as hoarfrost; the somehow cool inner surface of her right thigh when he traces it with his mouth from above her knee and which echoes heartbeat when he presses his ear hard to it and dares listen. Against him, she’ll writhe as indolently snakelike as a thread of extinguished candle smoke, and they’ll smile and talk in murmurs and fall each in turn upon the other, and the world will be soundless apart from the noises they make, their voices twinned in hushed promise, the static charge of their breathing, and the joints of the bed beneath them in full, relentless moan. So many worlds, each its own reality, exist within breaths, and all it takes to pass between them is to close off one and open onto another. Motes of life get trapped, something gets noticed in a way that can never be undone, a widening of eyes, hair spilling in certain fashion darkly over skin or across the snow-white pillow, an unexpected stiffening or collapse of light. And the moment is caught, like in a photograph only more fully blown, with all its senses intact.