Bird of Passage (16 page)

‘I can see her now. She had a red notebook in her bag and sweets, a poke of boiled sweets. Sherbet lemons, I think. They were all stuck together. She broke one off, and she gave me a sweet.’

She had popped it into his mouth before he could tell her that he wasn’t supposed to have sherbet lemons because they made his mouth sore.

‘She asked me a lot of questions about my mother, and she made notes in the book. She wrote down the things I said. I wish I hadn’t said anything. It was my fault. She made me get into a car.’

He remembered the leathery smell of the seats in the car and the lemony taste of the sweet and the way it made his mouth sore afterwards. His mammy would be cross with Mrs Maguire for giving him the sweet without asking her first. She would make him rinse his mouth with warm water, with a bit of salt in it, to soothe it. But he didn’t remember much else about that day. They had driven for a long time. He had never been in a car before. It had made him feel sick. He and his mother always travelled by bus, or on foot. Each morning, she would walk him to school. He loved that walk, holding her hand, talking to her, swinging from her arm.

Every day, on the way to school, they passed a warehouse, with a yard in front, and in the yard were half a dozen fat, friendly cats, black and white, ginger, tabby. He and his mother always stopped for five minutes to pet them and stroke them, scratching the sweet spot under the chin or behind the ears. He could see them now, their fat, jowly faces with bristling whiskers, their arched backs and soft fur. He could see himself petting the cats, and his mother saying, ‘Careful now, Finny. Gently. You have to be gentle.’ And the purring. The miracle of the purring, as though each cat had a small engine inside and the more he stroked and scratched, the louder the purring grew, the more he could feel that vibration through his fingers. But he didn’t want to talk about that. It was private. Not for sharing.

In the car that day, Finn had fallen  asleep, leaning against Mrs Maguire. She had smelled of mothballs and peppermint. When he woke up, it was to gathering darkness, and a driveway that seemed to go on for ever, with a big grey building, like you would imagine a prison, at the end of it. He could tell Kirsty about that. He could speak about that.

‘I remember getting to the school. That first day. The smell. Boiled cabbage and bleach. The sound of footsteps, running footsteps. They shaved my head. They said I was a dirty boy. But I don’t think I was. I had a bath when I could, and my mother made me wash every day.’

Another picture came into his mind. Himself, standing in front of the sink, in his vest and underpants. There was soapy water in the sink, and his mother had a pink flannel and she was helping him to wash. She said ‘you have to wash up as far as possible and down as far as possible, Finny,’ and he said ‘what about possible?’ She started to giggle and he started giggling too, although he hadn’t the faintest idea what they were laughing about, but when she was happy, he felt happy too.

‘All the time, I was wondering where my mother was.’

Kirsty was dismayed. This sort of thing was quite beyond her understanding.

‘What was wrong with her? Why did they send you away from her?’

‘There was nothing wrong with her. But she wasn’t allowed to be there. With me, I mean. I think they sent her somewhere else.’

‘What about your daddy? Couldn’t he have you?’

‘I don’t remember him. I remember my mother a lot better than I remember my father.’

 Finn hadn’t thought about him in years. His name was Ronnie O’Malley, and he was a singer. At least that was what his mother had told him. But now, he didn’t know what was true and what was made up, what he really remembered and what was only another story.

‘What was your mother called?’

‘Mary, Mary Flynn. Then she married my dad. She isn’t dead, Kirsty. Just somewhere else.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know. They would never tell me.’

‘Did she leave you?’

‘I don’t believe she would have done that. She used to say that she was from   a town called Ballyhaunis, in County Mayo, but I’ve never been there, and I have no notion of what it was like.’

‘So why do you not remember your father?’

‘He was the one that left. He went off to work in England. He could sing. My mother said he sang like John McCormack, Count John McCormack, she always said, but I couldn’t tell you who
he
was, at all. My father would sing in bars and make a bit of money that way. My mother ran away with him. Her parents didn’t approve, but they went to Dublin, and then they got married.’

His mother had been at pains to tell Finn how happy she had been and what a fine man his father was. She told Finn that when he was a baby, Ronnie would sit him on his knee and dance him up and down and sing to him. And she would do a bit of the singing herself, to show him.

‘Dum dum diddly do, dum dum diddly day...’

Sometimes Finn thought he could remember feeling safe, with two arms around him, and the cheerful voice singing in his ear, but mostly he knew that he was only remembering his mother’s version of the tale.

 ‘Do you look like him?’ asked Kirsty.

 ‘I never saw a picture.’

‘Did your mother not talk to you about him?’

In spite of the fact that he had died when she was so young, Kirsty’s father was a very real presence in the house. There was a photograph in a silver frame on Isabel’s bedside table, a wedding picture of James and  Isabel, looking uncomfortable in their fancy clothes. The photograph was black and white, but you could see that Isabel had fat dark curls, while James looked just like Alasdair, so he had been the sandy one, the one who gave Kirsty her red hair. On the sideboard, were trophies that James had won for ploughing, and there was a pair of his working boots with the mud still caked on their soles, in the wooden blanket chest in the upstairs hallway.

‘I used to ask about him,  and she would answer me. But it made her sad when she talked about him, so after a while I just stopped asking.’

His mother was sitting at the window and sewing. It was summer, the window was open, and the creamy net curtain was billowing inwards. There was the clack, clack of the old treadle machine as her foot went up and down, up and down. Where had the machine come from? A man had brought it into the house, hauling it up the stairs. Had that man been his father? He didn’t think so. He had a fleeting impression of somebody coming into the room with a heavy, wooden case. There was a smell of wax polish off it, a nice smell. His mother would use the machine to make cross-over pinafores for herself in blue or red gingham, and shirts for Finn, for going to church on Sundays.

He had liked going to church on Sundays, even though he got a bit bored. He liked the smell of incense, and the candles that you could light for your ‘special intention’ if you put a penny in the box, and the confessionals that looked like miniature wooden churches. He imagined them peopled with tiny congregations. He liked to watch the priest in his green dress with white lace beneath, and the altar boys with their lacy dresses,  although  he was never very sure why all these boys had to wear dresses like girls, but maybe they were just made that way. He even enjoyed listening to the priest’s wavery voice, singing the mass in a foreign language that Sister Rosalie told them was called Latin, a dead language, she said, wistfully, but he didn’t know who had killed it. His mother would nudge him, and he would look up at her and she would pull a face at him and make him giggle. The church was warm and comforting. Sometimes he would even fall asleep in there, leaning against his mammy’s side, her arm around him, his head tucked in close to her soft chest, his cheek against the prickliness of her grey wool costume.

‘But didn’t you have grandparents? Didn’t your mother have her own family?’ 

‘I told you. They lived near Ballyhaunis. But I never met them.’

‘So where did you live? When you were a wee boy? You must remember that, surely.’

 ‘I remember the room we had. It was in Dublin. Just the two of us. The woman downstairs looked after me while my mammy went out to work.’

His mother had a job in a factory and she had to go out very early to get the bus. She used to wrap Finn up in a blanket and carry him downstairs to the neighbour who looked after him. The whole house smelled of smoke and cabbage and a dusty smell, like old feathers. He could see it in his mind’s eye, as well as smell it. Their room was right at the top of the house. It got very hot in summer and very cold in winter. He could close his eyes and he was back there, lying in bed, in summer,  listening to the noises in the street, below. If he closed his eyes he could  feel his mother’s arms. She had soft arms with little freckles on them. And he could smell her – a mixture of cigarettes and  perfume.

‘Go to sleep now, my lamb!’ That’s what she always said to him. She would push the hair back from his face. ‘Go to sleep now, my little soldier.’

‘You look sad,’ said Kirsty, breaking into his thoughts.

‘No. I’m alright.’

‘You’re away from that place now. That school. You don’t need to go back there, ever. You’re safe.’

‘I know.’

‘But  I suppose you wonder where your mother is.’

‘Wouldn’t you? If you were in my shoes?’

‘You’ve never heard from her since?’

‘No. But it wasn’t unusual, Kirsty. Nobody did. We were supposed to forget.’

‘How could you forget something like that?’

Finn said nothing. Just stared out to sea. But Kirsty was right. How could you ever forget something like that? And yet there was something he
had
forgotten. Something he had done, or not done. Something terrible which was all his fault. And about that, he could remember nothing at all.

CHAPTER TWELVE

One Sunday afternoon in early May, when Finn had been living and working at Dunshee for a couple of years, Kirsty carried him off on an expedition to find the well of the winds, an ancient site in the north of the island. Alasdair was fond of telling tales about it.

‘In the old days, when my grandfather’s grandfather was a boy,’ he said,  ‘the sea captains who might be becalmed on the island would go to the well and ask for a wind to carry them away. There were two old women who were guardians, and they would uncover it, if you paid them a little money, and then they would clear the water with a clam shell and mutter their spells over it, and the wind would blow. But they were always careful to cover the well when they had finished, for if they didn’t, the waters would overflow and flood the whole world.’

Kirsty had never been there before, but her grandfather had given her directions. They cycled to the north end of the island, Finn borrowing Alasdair’s old bone shaker, left their bikes in a ditch and walked along the boundary wall between one farm and the next, as far as the lower slopes of a hill called
Carn Na Faire
or the Watch Cairn.  The well was supposed to be situated low down on the hill. When she was little, Kirsty had imagined a circular stone structure, like the pictures in her book of nursery rhymes, ‘Pussy’s in the well.’ But Alasdair had described a spring, a trickle of fresh water emerging from below a big boulder.

The lower slopes of the hill were hard going, threaded with gorse and willows, tangled with brambles which were just coming into leaf. Soon they would be white with blossom but they were armed with a million thorns. The spaces between were scattered with celandines and bluebells, with buttery primroses and dark violets, good enough to eat, patches, drifts, hillocks of them. Kirsty sat down for a momentary rest, and it looked to Finn as though she were drowning in yellow and purple flowers.

‘Isn’t this glorious!’ she said, running her hands over them. ‘Isn’t this just glorious?’

Finn had his fishing knife with him, and cut down some of the willows, so that they could pass. They scoured the lower slopes of the hill, listening for the sound of running water.  There were plenty of stones and damp places, but they could see nothing that looked as though it might be the Well of the Winds. And then, Kirsty noticed a patch of hillside where the willows seemed to be growing in a rudimentary circle. Stumbling over tussocks, she struggled between the branches. Finn followed, finding the going harder because he was so much bigger. The wind dropped and quite suddenly, they found themselves in a sheltered place, warm and quiet.

Dropping into the silence came the faint sound of running water. Ahead of them, a large boulder, embroidered with livid green moss, was tucked into the hillside, and below it they could see a line of muddy patches. Finn crouched down and began to scoop out the mud and grass at the base of the boulder. Soon, he had uncovered a flat stone. A trickle of water bubbled out from beneath it and, even as he cleared away the accumulation of leaves and moss, a pool formed miraculously beneath his hands. The bottom was clean and sandy.

‘Is it fresh?’ asked Kirsty.

He looked up at her. ‘I don’t know. ‘

‘Well, drink some and see.’

‘Do you think I should?’

‘Course you should. I’m going to.’

She was down beside him, steadying herself on his shoulder, kneeling down to scoop up a handful of the water. He saw the silvery droplets fall from her fingers as she carried them to her mouth.