He warns her to keep this to herself. What they are about to do is a crime against Hitler. He makes it clear to her that they are going to kill one of Hitler’s babies. He tells her to be quiet, stop crying, lie down. With the help of a small flashlight, he takes various items out of the medical case and prepares them on the table, the shape of his hands projected onto the wall like giant gloves. She asks him where he got this stuff, he says he has it from a reputable doctor, be still, don’t turn on the light. She lies on the bed in her room, with the buildings in flames around her, the fire services out, shouts along the street, people screaming their fear, grief laid open to the night sky. Her boss administers the injection like a giant bee-sting.
He tells her to lie still and wait for him.
She is on the floor by the time he returns. There is a burly man with him, they carry her down the stairs like a bomb victim. Nobody can tell the difference. They cross the street, she cannot stand, there is a house on fire, flames in the windows, the smell of phosphor and household things burning. They carry her to a parked car, she retches and leaves a stain on her boss’s suit, next to his party badge. Money is passed over. She is bleeding heavily. The driver spreads out sheets of newspaper on the back seat. There is an argument, more money is passed over. Finally, the driver helps to put her lying across into the back seat and drives off. Her boss stands on the street taking out his handkerchief, not to wave goodbye, but to wipe the stain off his jacket.
She gave me his name – Stiegler.
Have I become trapped by this knowledge? I am her story, her diary, the keeper of her nightmare?
The light came across the hill to face me. The gravel under my feet was the sound of trespassing. On a stone bench, I sat down and drew up my collar. The air coming into my lungs was like a window left open. The bay was spread out before me, I heard the waves below on the beach, the mountain was shaped like a volcano.
This was the place where we walked on Sundays, nowhere else could have so much power to repair the world. It was a long way for my father to go with his limp, but he knew it made my mother happy. She looked across the blue bay and took in a deep breath. Behind us, the gorse hill with the stone eagle. Where we once heard a dog barking and my mother told us it was not a dog but an owl.
The wide bay helped her to fall in love with the country that adopted her. She pronounced the word beautiful in a way that made this the most extraordinary place on earth. The word was reserved mostly to describe children and landscape. Children’s eyes, the truth in children’s drawings, the colour of their cheeks, the copper glow of gorse, the white collar of foam along the beach.
This was the view that stopped her from leaving.
Was it enough to keep me?
I made my way down the laneways to the small harbour where I used to work in the summer. It held on to the smell of fish and seaweed, the perfume of women coming to buy lobster, pointing out the dark blue creature still alive with elastic bands around its claws, soon to turn boiling red. Trawlers were coming in, gulls were moving across the bay to the north, maybe a landfill site.
By the time I got back, it was bright. Helen was there, sitting in the car outside. She was parked on the street, opposite the furniture showrooms. The children were staying with my mother, my sister Greta had taken them to the cinema. We should have been alone together, but instead I spent the night walking, she drove around looking for me.
Helen, I said. What are you doing here?
I opened the car door. She didn’t move.
Have you been here all night?
She stepped out of the car. She stood in the street, looking at the house where we lived as though she could never re-enter, like a part of her life had now gone into the past and she was unable to return. Everything appeared false in the yellow street light. The walls a cream coat of silicone, the windows made of black plastic bags, the door an orange sponge.
I brought her inside. I took her coat off. I put the fire on and waited for her to speak.
She sat on one side of the empty room, underneath the window, her back to the wall. I sat on the far side. We stared at each other. Outside, the house fronts were back to their pale colours, the leaves on the palm trees a dull green.
She took in a deep breath and composed herself. She turned her head to face the fire.
You can walk away now, she said.
I said nothing.
We’ll be fine, she said.
Fine? What do you mean?
Me and the girls, she said. We’ll make it. I don’t want you to go. I love you to the end of the world. But I won’t stop you.
I had no answer to that?
You never speak, she said. It’s like we live apart in different countries from each other. Sometimes I don’t know who you are, your silence is so hard for me. Look at you now, I don’t know your mind. It feels like you have been self-deported somewhere into exile, we’ll starve without words. If you don’t speak you’re not there.
I’m here, I said.
Don’t leave me slowly, she said. Don’t keep leaving me for the rest of my life.
The passengers going by on the early bus into the city could see us separated from each other, an empty football field between us. The green carpet, the fire, the poster of a stork carved in stone, the door left ajar, her knees, her feet, everything was up close.
I’ve got to go, she said.
She stood up and went to the kitchen. I heard her bare feet on the tiled floor. I heard the kettle swelling up. I heard her getting into the shower. She had the need to move on. Somebody had to get the children and bring them to school. Appointments to be kept. Down the hall came the sound of water, the scent of shampoo. In the kitchen, there was a cup of tea on the table, a slice of toast still in the toaster. She came out of the bathroom with a towel over her head. She buttered the slice of toast and took a bite, followed by a sip of tea, then she continued drying her hair under the towel, bending forward with the bra strap across her back.
The radio was on in the background. Soft words telling me the time, the traffic news, a tree down in Kerry.
I stood in the door of the bathroom while she was putting on her make-up. I was still waiting for her to answer my question, holding out for a piece of absolute truth. She was staring into the mirror up close, applying some eye-shadow, covering up the lack of sleep. The towel was draped around her neck like a boxer. She finally spoke to me across her shoulder, still facing the mirror, as though she was speaking to herself. Her voice was cheerful, up-beat, full of resumption, what she was saying was like part of the make-up she was putting on.
Do you remember the river? she asked.
She continued concentrating on her eyes. She spoke as though it was something practical, something from a list of things we should not forget during the day.
Remember, she said, coming back from the islands, that time we were standing by the river in Galway? The brown water frothing? Like something you could put in a glass and drink? Do you remember saying that?
Was she trying to distract me? The whole business of make-up, the eye-shadow, the subtle colour on her cheeks to soften the few freckles, the hint of lipstick hardly noticeable. This was the story of herself she was making up. The construction of her life, the truth she was going out with.
Remember staring at the water, she said. We saw a plastic bottle trapped by the bridge? Our minds were gone to mush, watching the bottle going around and around in circles for ages. Remember that? A boy on a bike stopped to see what we were looking at, remember, I pointed to the bottle rotating. And the boy couldn’t work out what we were so interested in. He kept looking at us and looking down at the bottle going around in a helpless loop, wondering how we could be so happy staring at nothing?
She turned to face me for a moment and smiled – do you remember that?
Of course, I said.
I could remember star
ing at the water rushing by, the froth, the sound, at times we almost forgot the water was moving and the river stood still, then it resumed in full flow, louder than ever. I could not remember the boy. Or the bottle. Only the feeling of being carried along.
She put her arms around my neck. She kissed me and drew back to look into my eyes. She ran her hand under my shirt and said the words for love that I gave her in the native language – bolg le bolg.
I heard the car starting. The smell of toast, a whiff of perfume in the hall, the radio repeating the same news. I stared at the cup of tea she left behind and tried to piece together the person she was – her breath, her frown, her mistakes, her belongings, her letters, the stick of salt she got from her father, the stolen spoon from Berlin, a galaxy of memory and human fabrication.
She is an actor, I said to myself. A method actor. Trained in London, at the Royal College of Speech and Drama. She belonged to a small backstreet theatre in Dublin, worked in the Stanislavsky system, she has done Strindberg. She can fake her own story. She is good at keeping things to herself. Good at keeping things from herself.
Her family comes from a country of actors.
Her mother pronounces the word beautiful with her hand on her heart. It’s given a musical lift. The beginning of a song, it makes people stop and admire the beauty of the word itself. They unite in appreciation of something that is better and more beautiful than anything ever seen before, like a piece of porcelain only brought out on special occasions.
It’s in their bones, that magnetic quality, the guilt-free smile, they show the honest face and conceal the honest heart. They are good at making things up, good at not answering like they’re in the witness box. They wear the truth like a coat, you can leave it open, you can fold it up and put it on the windowsill of a pub, you can bring it back to the shop and swear it was never worn once, you can get it altered, you can put it over the bed at night like an extra blanket when it’s cold.
Her grandmother loved nothing better than the fun of getting away without paying, bus fares, groceries, a full chicken hidden underneath her coat like she was pregnant at eighty, she liked to tell people she was related to the Bishop in Donegal, she went to work at the Irish Sweepstakes wearing a child’s pink sunglasses, one lens missing, nothing wrong, just to see what they would say.
Her mother has two oil paintings of a Dutch couple in the living room, bought for nothing at a house clearance in Donegal, she tells everyone in Canada it’s her ancestors, nobody can verify this in a foreign place. Nobody around to say the gilded oval paintings are of King Billy, William of Orange and his wife, what Catholic Irish family commissions portraits of themselves around the time of the Famine?
Her uncle in London is a caretaker, he had a great career in the Bank of Ireland before he suddenly left and took up a job in property management, he calls it. The portraits of King Billy and his wife originally belonged to him, kept against rent arrears. With nothing left he decided to renounce all wealth and material possessions, the only thing on the wall of his basement flat in London is the portrait of a boy prince, which turns out to be the lid of a chocolate box.
Her aunt in Wicklow is doing her best to become Jewish, but she has run into difficulty because none of her ancestors are anything but devout Catholics from Donegal. Now she has joined a bible group instead, Rosie and Essie say there is lots of singing and shaking in their house, hands on heads.
Her uncle in Birmingham likes to tell everyone there is something he needs to get off his chest which he has never revealed to anyone, not even to his wife before she died. He keeps everyone waiting, never reveals anything. He tells us instead how he once invited his boss and the other colleagues to his house along with their wives and gave them no drink, no dinner, just tea with slices of bread and jam – anyone for more bread. Just to watch the discomfort on their faces, the relief when he laughed and finally brought out the whiskey.
Her uncle in France worked in a gold mine in South Africa where he witnessed employees being stripped and beaten, he brought the violence home to his family. He has a lonely job travelling around France as a salesman for sports clothing. He can’t stop making jokes, his language is full of poetic mistakes, they love him, they think he’s funny, but nobody laughs like they do back home in his own country.
The aunt with the bunch of keys tells everyone she is a trained opera singer, she gives a high note and stops with a delicate cough, patting the gloves across her chest. She was disqualified from nursing for throwing a student nurse down the stairs, twice, Helen told me. She is full of generosity and getting the better of people, pro-life and anti-divorce. She can flirt with the wall. She comes visiting out of the blue, looking around the rooms while Helen is out, asking me questions with the keys rattling in my face – we have ways of making you talk. She looks me up and down, asking which half of me is German and which half is Irish. And what is my position in the native basement, she wants to know, am I managerial, and how are the yoga classes going, how many people can you pack into a front room no bigger than a laundry basket, what about the safety regulations? The children love her, she brings sweets and she asks them all the questions I cannot answer.
She is the left-behind version of Helen’s mother, what her mother would have become if she had stayed in Ireland. They have the same laugh, the same hourglass figure, the same way of saying the word beautiful, the same handbag carried on a lateral arm under the breasts to hold everything in. Two sisters measured against each other like two sides of a decision, the reflected image of luck and lost opportunities. When Helen’s mother qualified as a nurse, the aunt with the keys tried to suffocate her with a pillow. When she bought a bright canary-yellow dress to celebrate, the aunt with the keys bought the exact same dress, people could not tell them apart. When she got married to a man from Carrick-on-Shannon, the aunt with the keys ran off and got married to his brother.
So – two brothers married two sisters in canary yellow trying to outdo each other. Duplicate families in Ireland and Canada, founded on a bet to see which of them got the better brother and which of them could have the most children and which was the better country. A lifelong contest between the sister who left and the sister who stayed, which of them has the highest score of lawyers and doctors, who is having the last laugh, who has the funniest stories.
The aunt in Ireland was rattling the keys to a house she never owned. Her husband walked out. She moved many times. Never sitting in her own furniture. Unfamiliar kitchens, meaningless curtains, only the tea towels with home and shamrocks on them, enamel serving trays with a cottage home sweet home. She faked her own death. She was found on her back one day, legs out, one shoe half off. One arm was laid out underneath the coffee table, some magazines swept onto the floor and a glass of water soaking into the rug. Her curly hair was brilliantly arranged to fall across one eye like a murder victim, the keys in a fallen bunch some inches away out of her hand. As they crouched around to feel her pulse, she jumped up and laughed out loud – what took you so long?
I believed them all.
They lived somewhere between truth and invention, full of twisting and joking and theatrical deflection, converting themselves into stories.
I went to work. I got the newspaper from the vendor at the station, but I couldn’t read. The facts refused to transfer. I sat at my desk in the basement all day, staring at the pen in my hand, looking up now and again to see the feet of pedestrians passing by above my head. At lunchtime, I went out briefly to the park of lovers and ate my sandwich, the same tasteless two slices of brown bread with cheese.
I could not stay awake. I answered the phone in a drowsy voice. People passing by on the street could see my head down over my desk, long after everyone had gone home.
I got back late. After dinner I left the house again without a word. I turned right past the furniture showrooms, down as far as the redbrick terrace. Audrey answered the door. She smiled and brought me upst
airs. She showed me into the sitting room and threw herself on the sofa. She picked up a book, not reading, only smiling and watching. One knee was bent up, her bare thigh was showing. I looked away at the painting of lions roaming free among the fallen columns, the sculpture of the man walking, cushions laid out in a circle on the rug.
The dog came to sniff me, then he curled up on a blanket near the window. The chessboard was laid out. John came in with beer and we began to play.
Nothing was said.
There was a twitch in his right shoulder. A subconscious shrug, shaking something off. It made him look guilty. Maybe a bit homeless. One of those fidgety movements that actors put on in Beckett plays. A quirk to make themselves look more idiosyncratic, more internal, happier having their sandwiches alone in graveyards, they should try a day underground in a ghost language.
Audrey got up to answer the phone.
She had begun offering yoga classes. In direct competition with Helen. She wanted to take Helen’s place. She wanted to have Helen’s voice. In her London accent she said all the things Helen said, what yoga was good for, weight loss, lower-back pain, fatigue, migraine, menstrual cramps, insomnia, everything you can think of, really. She took down a name, gave the details, the number of sessions, payment in advance, bring a towel and some light clothing, leggings are best.
She put down the phone and disappeared into the kitchen, into the bedroom, it was hard to tell.
The dog got up and followed her out.
I was unable to concentrate. I made poor decisions. John looked up from the chessboard and caught me shrugging my shoulder. It was not my intention to mock him. The more he stared at me the more I shrugged.
If only I could speak my mind. If only I had brought the mouth carving with me. I could have placed it on the chessboard, right in the middle, in between the pieces, the open mouth facing him without fear – I didn’t come here to play chess. I’m here to break something. I’m here to cut you off.
Dublin Palms Page 9
