The Boatman and Other Stories

by Billy O'Callaghan

  She’d just settled to the fire again and was tearing more pages from the back of the history book, still with her eyes cast casually back towards Dunmore Head, when a rowboat appeared from one such stripe of greyness. Her mind tried to make sense of what she was seeing without quite believing a line of it, but the second split and her pulse began to race hard and then to pound until she felt fit to burst, and though the boat was surely still too far out, half a mile or more yet, she got to her feet and ran right to the grassy cusp and began to shout and wave her arms above her head.

  * * *

  Ten or fifteen minutes later, she was waist-deep in the sea, helping to drag the boat in onto the strand.

  The wait, now that help was so near, had been interminable, and she’d suffered one mad, frightening moment when she felt certain the boatman was just going to pass by, and she hurt herself badly in the nearly berserk effort of shouting and waving, trying to make herself obvious, until her right side burned and turned her faint, but even as she’d begun to wilt the rower raised a hand in greeting, and with several hard pulls on the oars brought himself in close to the rocks.

  ‘Did you see my fire?’ she asked, her voice flapping with shock. ‘Was that it? Was that why you came?’

  Across the span of the boat, Paudie Joe watched her, trying to understand. She looked as if she’d taken a few hours of the worst kind of beating, the flesh around her eyes hanging in blue hammocks, her head split open, crusts of blood dreadlocking her hair down her right side. He could hear pain in the higher notes of her struggling words.

  ‘Fire? No, girl. I didn’t see a fire. But if you managed to get one lit after all that rain then you’re a better hand with a few sticks than I am. No, it’s the storm that has me out here. To tell you the truth, I was a bit worried. We got a fair battering even over on the mainland, and I just wanted to check that you hadn’t been washed away.’

  They got the boat onto the sand and let it rock over into a starboard lean.

  And then he saw Thomas.

  ‘He fell,’ Isabelle said, in explanation. Her bones felt suddenly soft, and fatigue pulled her into the beginnings of a stoop. ‘He’d come out to check on the boat. When he was gone a while, I went looking for him, but the rain and wind made it so hard to see. I fell trying to come down the slope there, and hurt myself on a couple of rocks. I hit my head and I think I’ve probably broken a few ribs. All I could do for a long while was curl up on the sand. Some time after, I don’t know how long, he came and found me. But Christ, that path.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘I don’t know. Yesterday at some stage. In the morning, I think.’

  ‘And has he been out the whole time?’

  She looked at where Thomas lay. Now that they were safe, terror stirred in the deepest part of her stomach. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, he was awake at first. And he had no pain. Then he slept, and I thought that was probably best, that it’d give his body a chance to heal, you know. I got us blankets and plastic sheets, and we spent the night on the path there. There was nothing else I could have done. Maybe I could have dragged him down onto the beach, but the tide was coming in and the waves were huge. And then, this morning, I thought about moving him again, but I was afraid of doing even more damage.’ She let out a long sigh, and when she could speak again sounded very young, and in need. ‘Do you think he’ll be all right?’

  Paudie Joe let the question hang. After a hesitation, he fumbled among the contents that littered the bottom of the boat, found a bottle of water and a sandwich wrapped in brown paper. He held them out for her and she took them and let her stare follow as he started away for the path. From where she stood, she saw him clamber up the slope, stoop beside Thomas and, after a moment, bless himself. He hung there, unmoving, his face close to the rock, before eventually lifting his head again and considering her, the boat and the beach.

  ‘So, what do we do?’ she asked, when he came back down onto the sand. ‘Do we move him?’

  His eyes, nested in flesh, were slits and couldn’t seem to focus. Every few seconds he lifted his cap and ran a flat hand across his greased hair. His mouth twitched.

  ‘We don’t,’ he said, his voice rattling. He cleared his throat and began to dig in his pockets for a cellphone. ‘I’d say we need to leave him be.’

  * * *

  The inquest was, at least with regard to the law, a formality. Death by misadventure. Five weeks after she’d escaped Beginish, Isabelle had to sit on a raised chair in a room more like a school classroom than a court, and answer a litany of questions, but by then she’d already been a dozen times through everything that could possibly be asked, and nobody pushed her too hard.

  But months on, and even now, some four years later, there were mornings still – more often than not, actually – when she woke with the dawn to the certain feel of Thomas beside her. When that happened, she’d lie there listening and recollecting, straining for the sense of him unsettling the dark, and in those moments she’d either keep her eyes shut or fix her stare tightly on the ceiling and indulge in the memory of stretching out for his hand, or rolling against him and reaching across his chest for the faraway flap of his heartbeat. As everything turned real, she wept, on and on until dawn whitened the walls around her, minutes that passed soundless except for the inner sobbing of a tide and the remembered promises of his hushed voice breezing against her skin when he brought himself to her with all his uttered talk of love and beauty, all the gasping assurances of forever, and all words that left her carved open and hollowed with despair.

  And when, on towards seven, the alarm began to ring, she’d knock it silent and remain a moment longer, wide awake in a bed and an apartment that he had never occupied, before getting up, the loneliness alive and strong within her, to dress ahead of yet another day.

  Love is Strange

  Miss Reilly, who was probably in her seventies when I knew her, had never married. I remember asking my sister, Bríd, about that, and she said that Lizzie Reilly wasn’t the kind of woman men wanted as a wife. Bríd was a year and a half older than me and, at fifteen, had taken to sneering at everything. ‘The wrong kind of ways, you might say,’ she explained, and did something knowing with her mouth. In those days, all her stories dropped away only half told. In silence, I watched her small fingers, with the nails bitten deep into the flesh and painted an ugly, flaking scarlet, pick a needle and thread through the high-risen hem of her best skirt, and tried hard not to stare at the bare flesh of her exposed thighs. ‘You’ll understand eventually,’ she added, with one of those put-upon sighs that she believed to be womanly as opposed to girlish.

  Whenever I passed Miss Reilly on the road, I tried to see her as the woman she must once have been. The fact that she had nothing in old age to mark her out as particularly ugly, no disfigurements or skewed features, meant surely that neither could they have existed during her youth and prime. Coppery tufts of hair bracketed her slatted mouth, but a little grooming would have cleared that deck in a hurry, and far uglier women than her had found men to share their burdens.

  By that time, ’61 and into ’62, the rust having long since set in, the Miss Reilly I saw most days shuffling through Douglas village was already stooped and halfway broken. Generally reeking with alchemical infusions of pipe tobacco and liniment, and with mauve or pinkish curls spooling out from beneath the lifted peak of a paisley-patterned headscarf, her shape was usually set lopsided by a string-woven carrier bag laden with pint bottles of Beamish stout, a loaf of batch bread, and tins of meat or sardines that would go mostly to her cats.

  If I happened to be out on the street I’d abandon whatever game I had going and run to her with an offer of assistance. If she was tired, as she usually was, if the heat and pollen were getting to her or if the winter’s damp had put an ache deep into her hips and knees, she’d wordlessly accept, and I’d take the bag and we’d walk together, I having to check my step to keep pace with her, up through the village and halfway up Donnybrook
Hill to the little range of terraced hovels where she’d been born. Until the previous summer she had shared the house with her brother, Séamus, who’d also never married and who’d years earlier lost an arm in a mill accident. I remember him as a quiet sort, usually three-quarters of the way drunk, no matter what the time of day, but muted from it rather than fired up, as some tended to get, dragging himself back from the post office or the pub in the direction of home, with his right shirtsleeve knotted at its elbow and his mouth always chewing on the silent words of some half-remembered song or prayer. One morning in late July, Miss Reilly found him cold in his bed, and some of the kids who lived along the row from her said that the doctor, when he came, was forced to dig nearly elbow-deep down the corpse’s throat for the palate of false teeth that had been swallowed in the struggle for those final few breaths. Now the old woman was on her own, but her life went on as it always had.

  None of the other kids ever offered to help carry her things, at least not that I can remember. I don’t know why I did, or why I liked her. At that age, I’m not sure what I knew. But she was old and looked so much in the want of help, and even if there’d been nothing else then that would have been enough.

  ‘Hurry, Sam,’ one of the boys would say, if she happened along while we were kicking a ball around, or playing glassy alleys, or just sitting on the kerb, going on about school or dogs or whatever John Wayne film we’d seen at the Assembly Rooms the few weeks before. Kelleher, usually, or McNamara. They always had the biggest mouths for mockery, and the stupidity to either miss or else not care a damn about the line they were crossing. ‘Your girlfriend is coming. Tell us, does the moustache tickle when she kisses you? Then again, maybe that’s what you like about her. Don’t you think she looks a bit like one of the Mexicans out of The Magnificent Seven?’ At first, I let them tease, but that proved a mistake because eventually a few of the girls from our terrace overheard and started making me their entertainment, and to stop it I had to take on Kelleher in the yard one day after school, Kelleher because he had probably ten inches in height on McNamara and almost as much on me, and I split his lip and made his nose bleed but let him get in a couple of knocks too, so that it would look more evenly balanced than it actually was and so that we could again be friends later on. And after that, the teasing mostly ceased.

  Miss Reilly never offered much in the way of gratitude, though sometimes she’d smile – a sad, distant kind of expression which would leave her so nearly overcome that she’d have to sit or else lean against some piece of furniture. ‘You’re a good boy,’ she’d say, on those occasional days when her mind focused enough to let her remember my name, and I’d laugh and tell her that she was about the only one who thought so, because my teacher certainly didn’t, and my mother often suggested, usually after I’d done something lousy, which was about forty times a week and double that during the summer, that I didn’t belong to her at all, that I’d been switched at birth by the faeries.

  ‘She doesn’t mean it,’ Miss Reilly would tell me. ‘People say things like that all the time. What we say isn’t always what we mean, especially to loved ones.’

  I’d shrug, because I was actually fine with the idea that I might have magical blood, no matter how wicked, and when things began to turn awkward, when the silence of the house took us over, I’d clear my throat, say, ‘Well, so long,’ and take my leave before she’d start to think I was waiting for something more, that I was expecting a reward of some kind. I wasn’t. It’s difficult to explain. I could say that it was because my father had put manners into me, that he’d taught me to respect the elderly, even if he never taught me much else. And that was certainly part of it. But the truth was, I simply liked being around her. She interested me, and I enjoyed her company.

  At thirteen I had started to feel a push to my horizons, and she represented one of the sides of the world as it existed beyond myself. If she was a parcel of blood and bones now then she still contained a wealth of thoughts, fears and memories, and maybe old laughter, too. I had a sense that time, even for the likes of her, was full in ways I couldn’t yet begin to know. When I looked I saw the etchings of mistakes, and the creases and marbling of disappointment, but when I peered close I also saw past them to the crowding shadows of chances taken and missed. Though I had little understanding then of what it all meant, I nonetheless sensed its significance, and it matters even more so now as I slip into the tallow bloom of my own old age.

  * * *

  ‘What are you playing at?’ Bríd asked me, one evening, probably of an August or September, given the quality of the light that brightens my recollection: the faded gold of a summer nearing its end. I was in the copper tub, hunched up in front of the fireplace in maybe five inches of water, trying to hide my young nakedness. She’d come in and just stood there, hands on hips, staring down at me, that familiar little smirk squeezing her lips. My father was on a late shift at the Mill; my mother was in the backyard, hanging out clothes on the line after a day spent washing.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Don’t come the innocent. You’re up to something.’

  ‘Would you mind turning around, please?’

  ‘Why? It’s not as if you have much worth seeing. And anyway, that water is filthy. I’ve eaten clearer soup. You’d be better off washing in the river.’

  ‘What do you want, Bríd?’

  She put one foot on the bathtub’s rim and set both hands onto her raised knee. I tried not to look up, and instead stared at how the sandal’s fraying leather thong separated her big toe from the rest. As usual, she’d painted her nails, a few crimson dabs that she’d coaxed from one of her friends, most likely Anna, who always had a ready supply because of a sister, the eldest of the Sweeney girls, living in Wolverhampton. I had a little bit of a thing for Anna, probably of all the girls in the village, because she was a couple of years older than me and because her straight waist-length hair made me think of the Apache women in the cowboy films I’d seen. And I loved that she called me Sam, the way my family did, and the closest of my friends, instead of Sammy, which was who I was to everyone else.

  ‘I want to know,’ Bríd said, lowering her voice a notch so that the sound would not carry out into the backyard, ‘why you’re hawking around Lizzie Reilly.’

  ‘I’m not hawking.’

  ‘Yes you are. Don’t bother denying it. The whole place is talking. And I’ve seen you myself. Carrying her bag up the hill for her. Everyone who knows you knows you’re rotten through, so you must be smearing it on like lard for her. What are you after? Sweets? Money?’

  ‘She’s an old woman. That bag is too much for her to be lifting. That’s all. And I don’t mind. I like coming back down the hill after. If you run fast enough you feel like you’re losing all control. You feel like you’re about to take off.’ I glanced up at her, but with the hem of her skirt gaping I caught a pinkish hint of underwear, and I looked away quickly, crouched further forward and drew my knees up towards my chest so that nothing could happen. ‘Not you, of course. People who are actually capable of running, I mean.’

  ‘Is she paying you? Is that it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because I need six shillings. We can call it a loan. Anna said her sister can get us Mystic Nylons and the six bob will even cover the cost of postage.’

  ‘She isn’t paying me.’

  I could feel my sister watching me, but refused to look up. Finally, she removed her foot and squatted down so that she was on her haunches beside me. She held on to the rim of the bath for balance, and though she didn’t have the strength to move it something about this disturbance caused a little water to slop out over the side. The flagstone floor around the bath darkened.

  ‘If you’re holding out,’ she said, bringing her voice down to just above a whisper and filling it with menace, ‘if you’ve got a stash, I’ll find it. And then you’ll have nothing. But if you gave me the six shillings I’d never bother you about the rest. And I’d make it up to yo
u.’

  Out through the open door onto the yard, our mother was almost to the end of the line. A breeze was causing our vests and my father’s shirts to sway. I couldn’t help myself. I turned and met Bríd’s stare. She was serious, and trying to be sweet, but her eyes were wide and green without the sheen of direct light, and I could see the tension pulling at the muscles of her face.

  ‘How?’ I whispered, my mouth suddenly dry.

  Her lips tightened at their corners. ‘Don’t ask stupid questions,’ she said. ‘Are you going to give me the money or not?’

  ‘If I had money,’ I said, ‘I’d give it to you. But I don’t. Swear and cross my heart. Not a ha’penny. Miss Reilly doesn’t pay me. I don’t look for anything from her.’

  The clench of her teeth caused her jaw to twitch hard behind its flesh. I knew without having to turn my head that, out in the yard, our mother was nearly done with the clothes. Bríd knew, too, because she pulled on her meanest smile, her final jab before the surrender. ‘Anna thinks you must have a thing for the old bitch. I told her that even if you had you’d be backing the wrong dog. Even the little you have going, the very little, would be too rich for dear Elizabeth.’

  * * *

  I finished with school that year. I made my Confirmation in March of ’62, and in early June, the day after we broke up for the summer, I started work in the Mill. A boy’s wages, but still, earning money. My father had already spoken with Tadhgie Burke, and even though you had to be fourteen in those days to get a start and I wouldn’t have been of an age until that October, they’d arranged it so that I wasn’t to be asked for papers and such until a week after the correct date. Our village had its own way of setting rules and settling accounts. Room was made for me within its walls, but it also locked me in.