My Coney Island Baby

by Billy O'Callaghan

  He studied the fire. As a child the flames had captivated him, lapping at the turf and dancing in fringes along the thin bark of the hedge kindling. That fire had become his vision of Hell, some mindset encouraged by what the missionary priests talked about whenever they landed on the island and took over the church. Hell as a scalding redness, not yet understanding how far that was from the truth.

  ‘I’m going,’ he muttered. ‘My mind is made up. You can’t talk me out of it.’

  The words met at first with silence and were left to fall away, and he felt relief but also a twinge of hurt at the idea that he’d somehow read the situation wrong. He wanted his going to be easy, on everyone. But not too easy. And the exhaustion he felt only deepened his confusion.

  ‘If I can’t, I can’t,’ his father replied, after allowing several seconds to pass. ‘I know the story well enough. It’s the way of the young to want to run.’ His eyes considered the glass, held up like something precious on a perch of ravaged fingertips, and his mouth shifted in search of more to say, the right words. But instead of speaking, he went into the whiskey, his stubble-ridden chin jogging with the effort. At that moment, backed as he was in shadow, he looked not just old but ancient. And nearly broken.

  They drank together; Michael, even relatively new to whiskey as he was, following the lead, feeling this as a prelude to the end. The fire was there still but burning down, and three glasses had to be the limit. But then the old man cleared his throat.

  ‘I never told you, or Áine either, but when I was a boy, just about the age you are now, I wanted to go to London. Word had it that there was plenty of work going and heaps of money to be made, and it took all we could do back then just to put a few spuds or a bite of bread on the table. I was great with one of the Shine lads from Cloonamore. Dan Joe, God be good to him.’

  ‘He’d be Sonny Shine’s uncle.’

  ‘That’s right. Ned, his brother, is Sonny’s father. Ned was that bit younger, but me and Dan Joe were the one age. I suppose we grew up together. And he was always on about London. Never shut up about the place. Though the truth of it, looking back, is that I was probably just as bad.’

  He sipped again from his glass, rationing it now, knowing that the night’s quota had been reached, knowing too that this should not have mattered but, for some unaccountable reason, did. ‘Stupid,’ he whispered, so low that Michael leaned in, sure that he’d misheard.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing. I discovered that I was suited to home. And whether you realise it or not, boy, so are you.’ He turned then and met Michael’s stare, and his mouth fractured with an uncertain grin. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not trying to persuade you. I waste enough of my breath as it is. You have your own mind, and you’ll make it up as you see fit. Christ, I can’t account for all this talk. It must be the whiskey. A good drop can do that to a man. And you should see what it can do to a woman. Well, you will see, I suppose, in time to come. Everyone sees everything eventually, I think. The things that matter, anyway. But I suppose I wanted to tell you something about myself, something you didn’t already know and that you could take with you when you leave here. Because I might not get the chance again.’

  The words, said in so casual a manner, made the moment seem part of the everyday, the every-night, and not at all the turning of new ground. A father and his only son pushed so closely together by circumstance, they’d grown accustomed to and tolerant of one another’s ways. But even though they lived and ate together and spent the bulk hours of each day working side by side in the fields or on the boat, they rarely spoke beyond surfaces.

  Growing up, Michael had been full of questions, though he was never aimless in his asking. By ten or twelve, he’d developed a thoughtful, even ponderous nature, of a sort that might still have yearned for wildness but which also needed fixed limits, edges to the world’s pictures. He wanted to get at the reasons for things, to catch a glimpse of the mechanics beneath the casing. How the fields knew when to flower, why the fish came at certain times of year and why always to the same waters when there were all the oceans of the world in which to swim. What life had been like back in his grandfather’s day, or his great-grandfather’s, during the times of hunger and the British. And why some people had more than others, and what made anyone want to live on an island when everything was so easily to hand in the big cities, everything but open skies. The answers, such as they were, leaned uncertain against the walls of day, Seán speaking without even straightening from whatever task lay at hand, his voice thick as storm-water sluicing in the grassy roadside gullies, drunk-sounding, on the edge of song, speaking some lament led only by its grief. Unfurling names, places and stories overlooked by history books but which had proven too significant for oblivion. And alongside, Michael kept on, even at eight, ten, twelve years old, letting his hands in mimicry rebind the nets where the reefs had split them open, or swinging the borrowed second scythe in low left-to-right sweeps, canting his way through the shins of hay or barley. And though in physical terms he focused strictly on his work, his mind was tuned fast to the things his father said, and he listened with fullest concentration, absorbing the words, the voice, the educating facts. He knew that the world had existed for ever, especially out here, where the air hung thick as mist with legend, the white cow tales that named the island and the sagas of Gráinne Ní Mháille, Granuaile, the Pirate Queen. But even with the stony evidence of Dún Mór, the Westquarter’s ancient ruined promontory fort, stacked high for him, even with the scars of Cromwell still tattooed into the ether and the crumbling or levelled famine shells mottling the fields along the many boreens, such past still felt theoretical rather than real, in the same way as the godly distances between stars or the notion that fire, earth and water live and breathe. These things mattered, but for him, at that age, darker and more intimate curiosities lay boxed within the silences, to do with his own blood. His mother had been a Flaherty, and centuries-sprung from this rock, a clan renowned on Bofin and, once upon a time, on neighbouring Shark. He longed but only occasionally dared to raise her as the subject, wanting to know who she had been but cautious of the heartache that he might awaken, recollecting too vividly the blacked-out months of grief which had followed her passing. When he did ask, after gauging the old man’s mood as good or at least approachable, he kept to the inanities that brought her to mind for them both while at the same time holding her at a safe distance. What she’d been like, beyond the stiffness of their few photographs and the crumbling memories that seemed less real with every passing year. Because even back then, the details of who she was had largely slipped from his grasp. There were nights still when he dreamed of her, and he knew her face without being able to quite focus on it, but the sense of her touch was becoming lost to him. Her voice, too. He couldn’t have sworn to the colour of her eyes or the make-up of her laughter. Even her smile was drifting beyond his reach into half-imagined shapes. And his father’s voice in answering always came carefully, as if speaking of a stranger, or of someone he knew but did not know well. She was of people made and meant for this place, Seán said, and for the ocean. The men, her father, her father’s brothers, knew the water better than anyone anywhere, they could have closed their eyes for a month and still circled the island clockwise and back, marking every current. They were hard, good people, honest in their dealings, but she herself, Bríd, was something else entirely, something infinitely more. ‘My wife,’ he’d add, as if needing the proof of such confirmation, and as if stating it could make it that much more real. ‘Your mother. Yours and Áine’s.’ A woman possessed of a sweet, wholesome nature, gentle as dew, without a strain of anger or unease in her body or mind. Beautiful, if you had it in you to look in just such a way. All she knew was love, and how to love, and she’d been taken far too soon, the way the best ones often are. That had angered him for the longest time, until he accepted that life keeps its own rules, and until he learned to sustain himself on memories of the years she’d been able to g
ive. The heavy words caught their cadence and rattled tightly to one another, the way bees drone inside the hive, all echo, their noise far too big and boisterous for their shape, but lulling. His eyes remained downcast and the work continued, hands threshing, or pulling stones, or hauling in the nets, back bent in gravitational press against the sloping of the land or braced to ride the rolls of ocean, but his talk fell in gluts, like syrup from a spoon, slowly torrential, unwinding memories of how she had been on any of a thousand nights spent welcoming his return, her dark hair maddened by the field winds, her weather-baked skin looking yellow-white as buttermilk through the clotted kitchen dusk. Those were the happy times, the painted moments, said Seán, addressing only the dirt, thinking aloud, yet even in the throes of this confession there was the sense of something being held back. And Michael, doing only what he could, grasped the fragments and read life into them, grateful even for that much. They were used to half-talk, conversations bulked out with nods and shrugs, their stoicism generations imbued. Silence was the strength of men and boys. Troubles of a more intimate nature were brought to Áine, who never laughed at anything, never teased or condemned, only tightened her jaw and dealt with what she could. This was the way of things.

  At the fireside, that last night, cradling the glass in both hands, the temptation for Michael was to offer some argument, for his father’s sake and for his own, some insistence that of course they’d see one another again, that there were years left to them yet, more than time enough for everything to be said and done. But every sip of whiskey further repressed the words and, for something to do, he took up the iron poker and stirred the embers. The fire, which had stilled to a soothing blend of warmth and colour, erupted in small explosions, a clod of turf shifted and then split apart, opening craters like gasping inhalations before collapsing inward in jags of flame and avalanches of ash. Seán leaned forward too, as though overseeing the operation, clutching his own glass but not drinking, and Michael knew the old man was holding back the little that remained because he liked to take the taste of the whiskey to bed with him.

  ‘Everyone at home told me not to go. My mother said the English had enough of their own and that they wouldn’t thank me for intruding. Of course, I thought different. At that age, I knew everything there was to know.’

  Understanding came slowly. Michael, somewhat distracted, focused on the idea of his old man not old at all but a teenager and with everything in terms of living still to come. He set the poker down.

  ‘You mean to say that you actually went?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Michael.’

  ‘Sorry, Dad. But why didn’t you say so before now?’

  ‘I don’t know why. I suppose it no longer seemed to matter. What’s done is done, and it was all such a long time ago. Until recently, I’d more or less stopped thinking about it.’

  Now it was Michael who reached for the bottle. It sat on the floor beside his father’s chair, and felt cold to his touch. He splashed a tot into his own glass, then waited at a tilt until the old man finished the little that he’d been holding back.

  ‘So? How was it?’

  His father thought about it, and shrugged. ‘Home was better.’

  Then, having committed to revealing something precious of himself, he seemed to retreat again, and he sipped from his glass, indulging his natural introversion. Michael waited without pressing, feeling an unexpected contentment. Exhaustion played a part, as did the alcohol, but even in the darkness some filament of clarity had offered itself. Sharing sixteen years of days spent working from hand to hand and nights tucked beneath the thatch, confined to a few cramped rooms and eating food hard-boiled and over-fried, drinking mugs of tea so hot from the pot crooked over the fire and stewed to such strength that it hurt your throat to swallow, talking but only ever of menial things, knowing well the ways of one another, knowing best of all the sounds of one another’s breath. But that night, it was whiskey, and the certain sense that they had never been as close as this.

  Home was better. Over another hour of clumsy, whiskey-fuelled meandering, Michael’s father felt his way towards explanation by describing deplorable working and living conditions, the nights wasted in stupor, the men, sometimes even workmates, friends of sorts, found beaten unconscious in alleyways behind late bars or strip clubs and, on one occasion, even stabbed to death, murdered for having offended with the wrong accent or for the couple of pounds of pay, the few remaining coins balled into a small note, in a coat pocket. But such rambling talk distilled easily down to this one irrefutable essence: home was better. And in that hotel room all the years later, listening to it told afresh and repeating the words to herself in a kind of hum, Caitlin sat up from the pillow of Michael’s chest and perched for some time, seconds or minutes, on the edge of the bed, gazing out of the window with her back turned to him. Her naked skin, where it showed through from beneath the raven tendrils of her loosened hair, shone a different shade of white from the whiteness of the afternoon, pale but spoiling towards the faintest tan.

  ‘And was it better?’ she asked, without turning, trusting enough in the tone of his reply, and perhaps also wanting to let them each feel this beat of separation.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Michael said, and reached out to stroke her cooling flesh, tracing the venetian lattice of her ribs where they bent inside the press of her right elbow and her upper arm. ‘For him, anyway.’

  He smiled at his answer, not understanding quite why but helpless against the rise of it, and she turned her face in profile, just for a second, and seeing all there was to see, couldn’t help but smile, too, maybe wanting to share in whatever was really happening, whatever was actually being said. Then she returned her gaze to the glass, and to the piece of Coney Island sky that stretched beyond, a matted screed of cloud empty of detail, at that moment a sky like any other sky.

  ‘He meant it as a warning, of course,’ she added, just before getting up to dress.

  ‘Of course.’ Michael, possibly attuned to the imminence of their parting, and resisting, let his hand climb nearly to the nape of her neck before scrying slowly downwards, and his mouth remembered the taste of that skin from less than an hour earlier, when he had rolled her over onto her stomach and kissed the full length of her spine up into the loose nest of her hair and ever so slowly back again, delighting all the while in how she’d trembled and called out in shy anticipation, asking him onwards.

  ‘And he meant well. The old man always meant well, in everything he said and did. But he was talking about a long time ago, when the world was a different place.’

  Caitlin listened, then turned and held his hand. At this point in time, his body had yet to bloat, and she considered him, taking in the bareness of his chest with its nipples ringed in webs of dark and already silvering hair, and then his throat and the first hint of softness beneath his chin, and finally, almost in afterthought, the details of his face. He lay back and waited, as he’d grown accustomed to doing, for her gaze to rise, and grinned in welcome, but she did not smile back and her trance never wavered. Even when their eyes met, he found her somehow out of focus with the surface. Her hand remained in his, slight and fragile and notably cold, but she kept to her pose. He watched the fingers of her free hand explore the inside of his wrist, her nails, trimmed but not too short and painted just for him in the deep terracotta shade of roof tiles and first blood, seeming like the only gesture towards colour in the whole room. Nothing could be hidden, naked in the moment as they found themselves, and yet so much stood between them, the things known and the things denied.

  There was always more to say, on both sides, but words made the leaving terribly hard. Finally, still entranced, still dreaming, she had slipped from the bed and begun to dress. Something within the colourless construct of the room should have changed, a shifting of the world felt overdue. Yet all was stillness. He watched her drag her black lace panties up her thighs, and everything about her boasted the subtle grac
e of someone trained to the stage, bending the way swans will in seeking the sun. And soundless, having stepped away from him, having already committed to going. Buttoning her blouse, pulling on her sweater, fixing her hair. Month after month it was the same, variations on the by-then familiar tune. His leaving home had played out in nothing like such calm. Full with the need to go, and telling himself as much, over and over, so that he wouldn’t hesitate, yet doing so just the same, lingering. As he stood in the doorway with the cottage to his back, dawn had broken across the fields, undoing the stitches of darkness, and the sky was a sheet of cloud, resembling from behind glass how the sky looked on any particular lost-and-found winter’s day out over Coney Island. At sixteen he was already broad across the chest, not yet a man but neither any longer a child, given to stillness from time spent on the water and squatting in field corners, understanding of the balance in all things, innocent enough still to believe in dreams and beating like a drum to run, but not yet set for such a wrenching. The air was cool and salted from the sea, and pure in a way that it would never quite seem for him again, except by suggestion, except on the very occasional spring or a late September day when another ocean or another side of this one happened to hold a swell and the wind blew just right. Behind him, in the dark of the cottage, his father sat at the kitchen table, head bowed over a mug of hot tea, while across the room, in the chair beside the burned-out fire, Áine wept, her fist clenching and relaxing around an old handkerchief that she held pressed to her lips in an effort to quell the tiny rumblings of her sobs. She was already married by then, and pregnant to a point just beginning to show; barely twenty but bulked and rubbed to a state of middle age. Her hands had the alabaster shine of cold-water work, and her hair, the bronzed red of teak and wild as bracken, spilt heavy around her shoulders. Tears came, in a strained, wrenching way familiar to their kind, and she let them fall. And caught between turning back and wanting to get away, Michael held himself in that doorway as the darkness broke and over the following minutes turned pale and then colourless, and he gazed out across the fields and the water beyond, trying to draw the flavours of the island inside himself, trying to gather in the small noises of the dawn, the birds in song, the thrushes and finches in the hedgerows, stonechats and pipits, the jerking pulse of a far-off cuckoo, and down by the shoreline the punctuating screams of the fulmars or the gulls as they circled to trail the leaving boats. Then, finally, his attention was snagged by a more sudden sound, that of the old man pushing his chair backwards on the flagstone floor and getting up to move around the kitchen in his usual cumbrous manner, colliding with corners and muttering something that was not words exactly but which was closer to words than anything else.