The Boatman and Other Stories

by Billy O'Callaghan

  ‘This is a special place,’ I said, in that instant believing it. ‘Time has no meaning here.’

  I kicked off my shoes and socks and rolled the legs of my jeans up over my calves. After a few seconds she followed my lead, standing awkwardly first on one foot and then the other, leaning against me. Beneath us the long grass was cool and soft, but the earth had its own warmth. Her feet were white and sweetly fleshy, and her toes clenched at first but then stretched open and I could see pleasure in her face at the recollection of this feeling from childhood days when summers were often spent barefoot.

  Our period of separation had altered details of her, tightened the corners of her mouth, maybe took a little of the sheen from the skin beneath her eyes. But she was still the beauty she’d always been. My grandmother used to say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I suppose in my case at least, having thought of nobody else since our parting, even when there’d been occasionally others to think about, and having filtered every word of everything I’d written over the past twelve years through the memory of her, that had proven true.

  ‘Okay,’ she whispered, while I dug in my pocket for the folded sheets of paper. I could feel the tremble in her voice. ‘I’ll marry you. I’ll play. And we’ll be happy, for the time we have left. Only, don’t ask for more. And don’t think about forever.’

  ‘Up here,’ I said, trying to smile, ‘now is forever.’

  But she shook her head. Tears were in her eyes and trying not to fall.

  ‘Please, Billy. I won’t leave him. You asked that of me before, and my answer is the same. What we want doesn’t matter.’

  I thought I’d feel differently, and that something would have altered in our relationship. Sweet as it was, though, our moment proved simply of itself, another of the best details stamped into our time together but a gesture and, for all that, a performance, and afterwards the world continued to turn in its usual way, dragging us slowly yet again apart.

  In the circle, I read aloud the vows I’d written and my life has never known moments of greater intimacy. While I was speaking, and then while she was, nothing existed outside of that ten-foot circle. The skin of her hand was hot from my touch and full of pulse, and she hung on every word I recited and mouthed my own phrases back at me, the most vital ones, forging a soundless chain of them in some desperate attempt at permanence. Making sculptures of them.

  When it was her turn to speak, she became embarrassed. A smile whetting her mouth, she raised her pages and began, with some hesitation, to read in very slow Chinese. Once I stopped expecting a translation I relaxed so completely to the cadence of her voice, the tone rippling between highs and flats, that I was able to catch the ending, when it came, as forced and cut short, a hesitation that widened into greater silence, and though I didn’t challenge her on it I knew that she’d settled things in too broken a way and that some important sentiment had gone unsaid. She watched me, the sheets of paper still in one hand, folded back along their lines into a small rectangle, and it took me a second to be able to breathe again, and to smile, and, finally, to open my arms for her.

  ‘I wonder,’ I said, speaking against the skin below her ear, ‘if we’re the first people to ever marry within this circle. But who knows, maybe this is actually what it was for.’

  And maybe to preserve the moment, or just to silence me, she moved in my arms and found my mouth, and I closed my eyes and told myself that this at least was something new, not for the world but for us, our first coming together as husband and wife, and a sense of life coursed through me and I hoped through her, too, the same river flow, bringing thoughts and taking them back, awakening our histories and fusing them together, even when they couldn’t properly fit. But while nothing stops time quite like a kiss, and nothing makes so much of a moment, no kiss lasts forever.

  I reached for the sheets of paper that she held crumpled in her fist, attempted to smooth them out and examine them in search of revelation, then asked that she tell me what she’d written, what the words meant.

  But she just smiled. ‘Keep them if you want,’ she said, turning from me, opening herself again to the view. ‘You know they talk about love. But don’t ask for more. Let the rest be mystery.’

  * * *

  In the days following, knowing the value of what I had and was about to lose, I lived as much as possible in the moment. Waking early to watch Mei sleep, filling myself with details of her; brushing our teeth together at the bathroom sink, watching one another in the mirror; soaping her back and feeling the soft and hard places while she sat in the bath with her knees pulled up against her breasts and her arms embracing her shins. There was so much to be said but silence was just easier, and our stares held for long moments, across rooms and close up, already filling up with the loneliness that lay ahead.

  On the morning of her flight, I woke to an empty bed. It was still dark, which would have put the time at somewhere between probably four and five, and at first I lay there, feeling bereft. I listened for the sound of her, but the radio in the corner of the room was playing low, a rope of old songs, the words and melodies of which kept her hidden. Early Tom Waits; Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’; Marianne Faithfull singing ‘Ruby Tuesday’. Music made with the smallest hours in mind. Outside my window, rhapsodies of gale pulled at the jagged top of a young roadside hawthorn, and even though the glass kept the sound at bay, the wind’s ferocity set the few scattered stars to shimmering and made shreds of the night.

  Even without Mei in the room, her presence blocked out the space the way sand fills an hourglass, turning everything slow. That’s how I wanted it to be, and that at least was what I’d have, but I knew from before, from having already lost her once, such ghosts tormented as much as consoled. We’d taken an important step in reconnecting and had sworn we wouldn’t let that flag, so that it would be different this time, better even if still a long way from ideal, but keeping our promise meant condemning ourselves to a famished life, to the scraps that could nourish only the most fragile of hearts. In taking from a kind word and a smile far more than such gestures could ever truly give, we were committing to a delusion, but survival for most people owed an immense debt to lies, because lies were what kept us all still swinging long after the fighting was done.

  When the time passed and she didn’t return, I got up and went to find her. She was in the living room, sitting on a hard chair beside the glass door that gave out onto my balcony, and so tucked into the shadow that at first I didn’t even see her. A nearby street light sprayed its thin sheen across the glass and part of the floor.

  ‘Mei,’ I whispered, a little intimidated by the dark. ‘What are you doing up? Come back to bed. We only have a few more hours.’

  I came to the brink of the light but held back for just a moment because I was naked and could have been seen from the road or from other windows. She had her hair down around her shoulders in jet cascades and was wearing a long sleeveless nightgown, pink and mottled with tiny flowers, that seemed to absorb rather than deflect the darkness.

  ‘I’m cold,’ she said, turning away from me again, to the balcony laden with baskets of geraniums and chamomile daisies, petunias, morning glory and swathes of lobelia, and to the road and facing houses. The flesh of her upper arm was cool and soft, pliable to the pressure of my touch but already numbing itself against me. I felt her sigh, and then she stood and let me lead her back to bed. Beneath the covers we held one another tight and didn’t speak, and at some point, as dawn began to break unseen except as a pink reflection in the glass of the windows opposite, I helped her peel off her nightgown and we made love one more time, quietly except for whimpers that sounded like squeals of pain but weren’t, as she reached her high place and as I climbed hurriedly towards mine.

  At the airport I stood with her in line to clear security, holding her hand and whispering to her how much I’d miss her until we could see each other again and how we had to promise to email every day and to call one another at least twice a week. Sh
e looked serious and sad, and I knew that she was fighting to keep herself together, and in her face I saw an exact reflection of the way I felt. It was in my mouth to ask if she might change her mind, if she’d throw aside her morals and stay with me. She’d already given up so much for a situation that could only ever worsen, and with me there was at least a chance at happiness. But she’d heard these thoughts from me too many times. When it was her turn to pass through security, we kissed goodbye. The press of her mouth was familiar and gently firm, and tears spilt down her cheeks and onto mine, tears that’d come in floods for hours more, on the plane, with her face turned in a vain attempt at privacy to the small window, looking out on a scarred tundra of rain cloud.

  I watched until she slipped away and out of sight, and the void was exactly as I remembered. I sat for a while with a paper cup of coffee in one of the airport cafes, and it was easier to pass the time there than at home, because the apartment would seem so hollow after her and at least in the airport it was possible to feel that she was still close by. But an hour later, after the departures screen listed her flight as having left, I left too. I was limp inside, and home proved as bare and haunted as I’d feared, the silence a kind of roar around me. Trying to busy myself, I cooked something, chopping and stir-frying chicken, a sliced green pepper and green beans, favouring this because it kept me at the stove. Later, once night had taken hold, I switched on the computer and wrote a little, not concentrating, just letting it flow, the way I always did when things turned particularly difficult. Because this, as anyone who has ever had their heart broken by love knows, is how it has to be. The tide comes in and then recedes, and we stand and wait for it to come again. So much of life is waiting, but even ruined as we are, waiting at least makes room for dreams.

  Beginish

  They’d worked hard all winter, Isabelle putting in early shifts at the bakery and wiping down tables three evenings a week at a small vegetarian restaurant, Thomas taking advantage of the current financial boom to pick up work on one or another of the building sites strewn across the city: six weeks here, a couple of months there, the best of the jobs cash in hand for the long hours of hauling blocks and barrows of rubble. Life went on hold as, every night and tired to their bones, they slumped down together on their old sofa, and sometimes it took an hour of Isabelle’s gentle nagging before Thomas could rouse himself enough to take a shower, even though he reeked of sweat and his face was scorched from a day spent shovelling cement and mixing concrete. When they finally crawled into bed, too weary to concentrate on whatever was flashing across the television screen, sleep came almost instantly for him, but she usually resisted the pull, preferring to savour the late torpor, and she’d lie there on her side of their narrow mattress, tucked in against the wall and snug beneath the covers, with an arm draped across his chest trying to feel and measure his heartbeat and his dreams. Everything about him tasted always now of dust, even after he’d washed, and his skin had a parched, woody coarseness. The thin, slightly stooped boy that she’d first met some four years earlier was gone; manual labour had lengthened his six-foot frame and turned him broad across the shoulders. And she fell harder for him with every passing day. When he moved against her or when, as often still happened, especially on weekends, they’d wake ahead of the alarm clock and he’d lift himself up so that she could slip beneath him, his body had an assured heft.

  He was twenty-seven, she’d not long turned twenty-three, and they had married the previous July, in a simple registry office ceremony witnessed by his father and brother, two of her cousins, and a few friends. The marriage was something he’d pushed for, despite her continual insistence that their love needed no such certifying, and she’d only given in when, having tried everything else, he began shaping the argument in legal terms. One Sunday morning, during those languid minutes after making love, and with the darkness of the small hours still thick as blankets around them, she’d lain with her head against his chest and her fingers teasing half a dozen inches of the skin around his navel, and whispered in happy sighs of them being entirely one, heart and soul, body and mind. ‘Yeah,’ he’d answered, kissing the top of her head. ‘That’s true for today. But imagine if something happens. Either to me or to you. From that moment on, someone else will own the other half of us. When it comes to next of kin, the law is strict about such things.’

  Home – a rented, middle-floor bedsit of a three-storey house in Dillon’s Cross – wasn’t much, but didn’t need to be. Possessions didn’t matter; what they desired most was freedom, and to be free together. For now, and to open up that future for themselves, all they needed was a place to live, food to eat, and a bed to share. The rent on the bedsit was low, which allowed them to put aside a considerable portion of their earnings – as much as three or even four hundred, some weeks, if Thomas caught some overtime – and its location, little more than a fifteen-minute walk down the steep northside to the city centre, made it ideal for getting to and from work.

  * * *

  Through the winter, all their talk had been of escape. With rain or hail scudding the amber-lit glass, they read intrepid travelogues and picked through the clammy, full-colour, library-copy pages of National Geographic on the wonders of the South Pacific. The Marquesas, Tuvalu, Pitcairn, the Marshall Islands; places exotic in both name and fact that barely freckled atlas maps. Such fantasies suited grey days and long nights but gradually, as spring approached, their sights began to shift in more realistic directions.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Isabelle said, one morning in late March. She was sitting on the bed, naked except for one of Thomas’s old oversized T-shirts, and with a mug of green tea in one hand and a triangle of buttered toast held delicately in the other. ‘As great as Polynesia sounds, we have islands here at home, too. And what do we care, really, when all is said and done, about the weather? I mean, neither one of us can even swim.’

  Thomas stood across the room, at the toaster, in just his boxer shorts, waiting for two more slices of bread to brown. The radio had just dispensed with the 6 a.m. news and was full of Talking Heads, ‘Once in a Lifetime’, and wind from the west flayed the glass in occasional gusts, whistling whenever it caught a split in the window’s old, rotting frame. Sleep was still on him, and his eyes kept sticking to corners. But when her words filtered through, he looked up.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said, after several seconds of consideration, his voice hushed with something like wonder. ‘All we’re after, really, is somewhere big enough for the two of us, a place where we can be away from everything and everyone. That’s it, isn’t it? I don’t mean to own, and we’re not even talking about forever, but just to try for a few weeks. A month, maybe. A bit of ground, the sea and sky. And us. Our very own Eden.’

  ‘Do you think we can, though?’ Isabelle chewed at one corner of her toast. ‘I mean, is it even allowed? We’d probably need all kinds of permission. It sounds like way too much fun. There’s bound to be some law against it.’

  But a seed was set, and in the weeks that followed, the idea turned into an obsession, until they thought of almost nothing else. Their reading habits changed. He studied maps and researched tides and fishing techniques, the most efficient ways to light campfires, and how to build safe and solid shelter in the wild. She combed library books and documentary channels for tips on living off the land, what could be eaten in terms of berries and leaves, and what could not. The trick, they both gradually decided, was to start gently, to give themselves a taste of it, keeping the getaway to just a month at first and hauling a small but sufficient supply of backup rations. And if all went well, Thomas said, they could consider it a trial run and start thinking about making it a whole new way of life.

  ‘Just the essentials. Tins of food, beans, fish, maybe some cured meat. In case of emergency.’

  ‘Don’t forget water,’ she added. ‘Because it’d be just our luck to walk into a heatwave.’

  ‘Funny.’

  ‘Seriously, though. I can hardly be
lieve how excited I am about this. It’ll be the honeymoon we never had.’

  He looked at her, and smirked. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘That’s because I’m the brains of this outfit.’

  ‘True enough,’ he said, with a shake of his head. ‘But maybe that’s where we’ve been going wrong.’

  * * *

  Following a careful surveying of the coastline, both in books and on the Internet, they fixed on the Blaskets as their most viable option. The tight cluster of islands just a few miles off one of Kerry’s more remote corners had been evacuated back in the 1950s, when it was felt that the safety of the inhabitants could no longer be assured, and though they’d remained uninhabited, in recent years a solid tourist industry had blossomed around them. During the long season that thrived between March and October, throngs of middle-aged, raincoat-clad Americans and Europeans arrived at the state-of-the-art visitors’ centre perched on the final few yards of the Dingle Peninsula to wander among the various exhibitions and audio-visual demonstrations of long-ago island life before shuffling as a pack down to Dún Chaoin harbour and boarding the ferry for an excursion across to the main island. There, accompanied by one or another of the young students claiming a blood connection with the place in order to earn some summer cash, they picked through the remnants of the near and ancient past, grinning all the while with delight at their guide’s accent and hanging on every sing-song syllable of the stories being spun: a hard twist of history and fantasia, bookish facts on the earliest settlements as well as more colourful tales, either handed down or simply fabricated, of shipwrecks, piracy and perfect storms, of the ravaging Famine days and the final heartbreaking government-enforced exodus.