Five Bells (12 page)

 

For almost two weeks Da lingered on, in the ghastly hospital. They all visited together, the mob of them, the whole Healy
clan, and one of the nurses whispered ‘thick as thieves' when she saw them standing together. They decided to ignore her and later mocked her moustache. They were proud and loyal and always looked out for each other.

One evening, in his extremity, Mam slipped Da a sip of whiskey from a flask, holding his head as if she were holding Jesus. Catherine could not get the image out of her mind, her father dying in a soft and helpless way, her mother cradling him, being Mary, loving him to the end. Though he was sunken and disfigured by his cruel condition, though he dribbled and could not speak and stank of disinfectant and sour breath, Mam loved him to the end just as Mary loved Jesus, full of drowsy sorrow and miraculous belief, aware of the compassionate eye of God and blesséd, as the blesséd Virgin Mary was, First Among Women, Mother of God, Cause of Our Joy and Mystical Rose, so special and so separate in her prayerful weeping.

When they arrived home it was as if all the hospital smells had followed them: Mam sprayed Lily of the Valley from a can, and placed new mothballs among their winter clothes. These were the confusing smells of her father's death. These were the smells of grief unlike a fallen leaf.

Philomena had called out ‘Who's for tea?' and they had gathered then, stony-faced, in a circle at the table. Brendan was crying as much as his sisters. He was nineteen, a handsome lad and a hit with the girls, but on that day, at the table, he was returned to boyhood. Red rimmed his eyes and tears ran on his cheeks. Grief had swollen him. He carried it flaring like disease beneath his skin. Catherine loved him all the more when she knew that his grief was like hers. They shared this too, the community of sinners, the peculiar piety of atheists and of sinners unredeemed.

‘Those of us that don't believe in Heaven must stick together,' he once said, ‘and believe more strongly in this world –
here-now
– in this gorgeous mad fuck-up.'

Mam believed: she led a little prayer. They all crossed themselves – even Brendan – and consoled her in this way. Pretending. Performing. In this gorgeous mad fuck-up. Around the table their heads were as beads on a rosary, caught in one beseeching purpose, seeming all the same.

 

The time of mourning knitted Brendan and Catherine more closely. She remembers that at the Estate there was never any privacy or quiet. Brendan had moved close to University College, using his scholarship to rent a bleak room in a grimy boarding house, the kind full of shuffling old men muttering nonsense into their shirtfronts as they fumbled for begged cigarettes and tripped on the stairs. He was studying literature by then – something Da never understood – and dressing in second-hand clothes from charity bins which he wore with a rakish and heedless flair. Women adored him. He was in love twice a week, and writing volumes of poems to girls with blue eyes and black hair, listening to dramatically unhappy songs and learning the constellations.

‘
Our stars come from Ireland
,' he told her more than once.

For years Catherine had found this saying enigmatic and only after Brendan died did she discover that there was an American poem of this title, by Wallace Stevens. Somewhere in America some poor bastard was thinking of Ireland, thinking of distance, and the turning planet, and of the sky sliding its twinkling diagrams through the dark, lonesome night. Some Irish foreigner, gone-in-the-head, in a new far land. Some Son of Erin staring homesick at the starlit heaven.

Celestial glissade
, Brendan called it, in one of his own poems.
East and West confounded.

They spoke of the stars. They looked at and considered them. As you do. They spoke of Da and death and the absence of the hereafter. They helped each other. And although Brendan had
love-affairs non-stop he seemed without intimate friends, and Catherine knew that somehow she provided this too, a kind of comfort of understanding and the forgiveness of all sins. He seemed wholly unmindful of the difference in their age; it was from Brendan she first learned of the abstract and extraordinary operations of sex, from him she heard of Marx, and mixed drinks and the relativity of time, of Wolfe Tone, and the Easter Rebellion and the whole heartbreaking, maddening, fitful-fangled quality of Irish history. Books and music became the trade between them. Band Aid happened (how they both hated Elton John) and yet another Eurovision (‘and who could forget,' Brendan said, in a high-pitched TV voice, ‘the glorious achievement of Johnny Logan singin' “Hold Me Now”, bejesus and bemary, ah hold me now, in all his star-spangly, big-eejit Eurovision glory. Go hold yourself, said the tart to the bishop …')

So many sentences of Brendan's speech wafted in Catherine's memory. They trailed through at chance moments, like a delayed echo. Sometimes she would be altogether elsewhere, minding her own business, getting on with her life, and Brendan's voice would softly sound; and not only the content of his funny sayings and haphazard rude wisdom, but also his timbre and tone, his particular intonation, his pauses, his sighs, his put-on accents, arriving like a breath on the back of the neck, catching her shivery and unaware.

For a long time she believed herself a derivative creature, taking all she knew from her older brother. It was a place he gave her, on the rim of his life. So much of what she knew, Brendan had taught her. But her interest in journalism and rock music – these were truly her own. These she cultivated with an exclusive, almost irrational, devotion.

 

After the death of their father Catherine felt free to worship U2. There was nothing more beautiful in the world than Bono
bursting his lungs out, singing ‘With or Without You'. In the black and white video-clip on the telly he wore a leather waistcoat and no shirt; his naked forearms glistened and he eyed the camera as if he was shagging it. His face advanced and retreated in a system of dark shadows, oh the plea of miserable love, oh the dank seedy magnetism. No tinted glasses; the Edge wore no cap. They were unadorned and not yet so preposterously famous, not yet kings of all Dublin and Champions of the World.

Catherine found Bono's voice deeply sexual and romantic; she played him in her head like a dirty secret. At the end of the footage of ‘With or Without You' Bono emerged in half-light to swing his guitar like a madman.

Pure genius, that's what it was. Pure fecking genius, as Brendan would say.

Bono was so televisually distraught every young woman in Ireland wanted to comfort him, to drag him from the punishing contrasts of Orson Welles cinematography to the quiet soothing twilight of an unmade bed.

Catherine was fourteen years old. The passions conceived then, felt in the quiver of the heart and the unmentionable spaces of the body, experienced in dear obsessions and constant cravings, these were as significant as any adult formulation of desire, and more direct, more alive, more radically imperative.

 

The train swung in a wide arc to emerge alongside sturdy buildings and suddenly pulled into Circular Quay. She'd not noticed the journey, it had been so swift. In this new city she was still moving in guessed distances and miscalculations.

Where was her ticket? She needed it to exit.

With or without you.
Jesus, she thought, still this fucking eighties' song, still a younger, sexy Bono hollering in her head.

Passengers all around her were rising to leave. There was
the etiquette of standing just apart, and waiting, and a polite crowding before the doors. Catherine hitched her shoulder-bag and rose up, out of her childhood.

And she reflected then that for all her adoration of U2, for all her wish both to follow and not to follow Brendan, when she walked on Raglan, or any road, she still sang the songs that her brother loved, she still heard his voice, and thought of every damn thing that he had taught her, and all the visions he had inspired, and their sweet sibling complicity. And when she closed her eyes at night she still dreamed of going faraway, to Australia, here-now, and eventually to China.

Circular Quay: she loved even the sound of it. Such was the fabulous allure of the place that by noon the crowds had further grown and voices and activity were multiplied. Secular pilgrims all bent on transcendental satisfactions. Ellie realised her own pedantry, thinking in these terms, yet what moved her was the same longing for accessible wonderment.

There were streams of people walking in a kind of procession to and from the Opera House, but more still aimlessly strolling or self-amused, just hanging around,
lollygagging
, taking in the scene. And then there were the regular citizens wanting to catch a ferry, those who must encounter every day this restless quality of excitement. The mix of peoples would be everywhere – at the Eiffel Tower and the Acropolis, at the Forbidden City and Borobudur, at Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon, at the Louvre and Uluru, at art museums that were architecturally wavy or contorted. Monuments addressed us this way: pause here, consider. What hunger is driving you? What loss? What ambition? How does this place figure in your dreams?

 

Ellie had not lost her thrill, or her bouncing heart. The white umbrellas were like flags, the colours of the crowd a festivity. The air still throbbed and hummed with a distant didgeridoo. It filtered and dispersed like religious communication, implying
inner worlds and the dimensions of deserts. And in her camera lay the ghost arabesques of the Opera House, radiant as neon light, an image she could not quite comprehend. Photon capture and digital transfer did nothing to explain it. An idea about the thing, not the thing itself.

Ellie hesitated a moment.
Download
was not equivalent to presence. Or the same as memory, which happened in an enclosure of flesh and carried the blessings of the body, and its manifold complications.

 

James. She must find James.

Ellie shrugged to adjust her small backpack and glanced at her watch. Another half an hour. She decided to sit beside the water and stare into space. The ferries came and left, churning the glistening water.

Combs of light
: where was that from?

On the water lay combs of light, shifting their patterns with fluctuations of current and wind. Ellie looked across to the Bridge and wondered if one day she might climb it. It must be a singular pleasure, with no end other than to rise, to see, to stand above the turquoise water and the green and yellow ferries and look out across the Harbour and the city spread between the ocean and the mountains. The great bowl of the water would shine up at the climbers, reflecting the sun like a giant mirror, and the faces of parents and children and taxpayers and tourists would be polished gold and transformed to mini-lights by its glare.

 

At first James and Ellie had groped at each other's bodies – ignorant kids, filled with vague prohibitions and sexual platitudes – just clumsily exploring. Each watched the other with an ardent and shy fascination. James's face was flushed coral, his eyes were bright.

After they discovered their hideout everything became
possible. They would lie on a blanket in the dusty after-school light, read to each other and talk in soft voices. Once James spoke of clepsydra: Ellie remembered it well. Miss Morrison had told them of notions of time, and said that the clepsydra, the water clock, was one of the earliest inventions. The Chinese, she said, devised particularly ornate and complex clepsydra. The Chinese invented everything, she announced without explanation.

Clepsydra,
from the Greek
kleptein
, meaning to steal.

She wrote
kleptomaniac
on the board, beside the underlined
clepsydra
and asked her class to consider how human time was measured.

‘Is it really kept inside your watch?' Miss Morrison asked. ‘Does time really tick? Or work by numbers? Or pass in neat measured segments? Might there be a time that flows, or indeed does not flow?'

Clepsydra involved vessels that dripped or leaked, flowed or seeped, making use of floating pointers or measures, sometimes of gears. It was a process, she said, of emptying and filling, a fluent time-passing, not one chopped into pieces.

Most of the class looked bored and perplexed. Someone was flicking balls of paper polished with spit. But for intelligent twelve-year-olds this idea was a revelation. Ellie and James truly loved Miss Morrison.

 

And that day, two years later, James was lying on his back in the abandoned foundry, looking at the cobwebby ceiling, all girders and split tin, and speaking, almost whispering, of the invention of clepsydra. He was recalling the year seven class and Miss Morrison with a kind of delicate affection.

That day James turned towards Ellie and ran his hand under her blue dress and she thought not of surrender but that she would gather him in. Ellie could feel James's warmth and arousal, and his body addressed and aroused her. What
she loved in him was his presumption, and his lack of presumption.

That day they decided for the first time to remove their clothes. James, lying down, awkwardly wriggled from his shirt and his trousers, then kicked off his underpants, flinging them away. Ellie was slower and more self-conscious. She lifted her dress above her head and pushed it to one side, then became aware of how little her breasts were, cupped in their modest bra, incipient and girlish. But James was already pushing the bra away, so that together and laughing they managed to dispatch it. James threw it high and sideways, and something in its lacy construction meant that it adhered to the gritty wall, as if casually pinned there. Ellie hesitated only for a second before she slid off her panties.

Without a bed to lie in, with only their blanket and their randy, impatient immaturity, they wrestled for a time and then gripped each other. James's mouth was at her nipple and Ellie was moved almost to tears; it was so tender a suckle, and so gloriously wet. His hand had wandered between her legs and slipped into the crevice. She knew now, with his boyish nakedness nothing like the pictures of statues she had seen in books, with this sense of urgency and novelty and trembling delight, why adults might want to cast off their clothes and enter each other's bodies, and what the intensified, messy kisses on telly might signal and portend.

And then James drew her thighs around him and Ellie felt a sharp pain. Her face lay at his chest. She buried her feelings there. James was sweating and his scent was surprisingly lovely. He was labouring, and looking down at her, and in her inexperience she simply lay still, thinking, not thinking. She could feel the contours of his buttocks and the sensation of access.

‘Ellie,' he whispered.

It was over very quickly. There was an aching pain, and a
little blood, but she felt in that unlit and quiet space that somehow she had made them both coherent. Even then she was irrepressibly romantic. In the inept grapple of two children she found an exultation. Ellie kissed James's damp forehead as he lowered sumptuously upon her.

‘I feel like singing,' he said. ‘I feel like singing.'

‘Sing then,' she responded.

That first time they heard afterwards a small animal scuttling nearby, and each flinched and looked about, conscious of another presence. A possum, they decided. They heard it invisibly skitter away. Ellie turned to James's flushed face and saw him smile back at her and laugh.

She became aware then of the twilight and the need suddenly to hurry home. Light from the evening scarcely penetrated the room. But she stayed a little longer, feeling slightly cold without her thin blue dress, one of her favourites, covered in sprigs of tiny white blossom (how these details remain), noting the seep between her legs and its unanticipated warmth, smelling the almond scent she associated thereafter with men's underwear, thinking, as she saw James flex his arms and stretch out beside her, of how vast a discovery this was, and how enticingly scary.

This cluster of illicit associations returned James to Ellie. Or meant rather that he would never be wholly released. The intimacy of their attachment was something neither could name. They did not call each other ‘boyfriend' or ‘girlfriend', they were too young to be ‘lovers', yet they were the holders together of an intricate pact. When they met in the empty building where James spread the old blanket on the dusty floor – as if they were somewhere on a picnic, or inside a story or at play – it was the culmination of these affinities altogether unexpressed.

 

Her mother never guessed. Ellie was unconcerned about her father, since he looked at the world and everything in it
through a scrim of shadows; but to her surprise, in that whole year, her mother didn't notice a change in her daughter or sense a new maturity. At seventeen, before Ellie left for university, Lil gave her a private talk about what boys might do, about how sneaky and downright importunate they were, about how, after all, they
wanted only one thing
. Ellie hung her head, as though reticent, not wanting to betray what she knew. And each time afterwards, with each new lover, she sought the implicated traces of her encounters with James. More than his shape, more than his touch, more than his off-hand humour and his inexperienced fervour, she wanted returned to her the ordinary astonishment of that first known body.

 

Ellie rose in the bright light and began to make her way to the restaurant. She felt nervous, ill-at-ease. What if they didn't even recognise each other? What if he leant across the table and tried to kiss her? Or worse, that they had nothing to say to each other, that the past was meaningless, and kiddie-romantic, and unfit for their adult-ironic thirties? What if he was married to someone called Emma or Claire, and had two delightful children, a boy and a girl?

In her nervousness Ellie decided to check her mobile: no texts, no messages. She was one of millions checking their phone at exactly that moment; she could see a dozen or so from where she stood. This community of the telephone, so pragmatically conjoined. Ellie stared at the sequences of letters and numbers. In the glowing alphabet in her hand lay every word in the world.

What was it Miss Morrison had said, all those years ago, about the invention of the alphabet? And why could she not stop thinking of her teacher?

 

Ellie walked with feigned confidence along the Quay, past the Museum of Contemporary Art, around which hung funky red
banners advertising something-or-other, past the seagulls aflutter and the row of docks for small vessels, and further, towards the Bridge, to the harbourside restaurant James had chosen.

She was surprised at the size of it and would have liked something smaller. It had a wide glassy front, the better to see the operatic view, and furniture that seemed entirely to be made of chrome. Everything glittered in the noonday light. The cutlery glittered, and the crockery, and the smiles on the waiters' faces, so that Ellie was reminded of a swimming pool, the shine rocking on water and the splashy, unnaturally echoey acoustics. She stood at the doorway waiting to be noticed.

‘DeMello,' Ellie said, in an apologetic voice, and a jerky impatient waiter pointed to a table. She saw James, looking away, apparently deep in thought. Her first impression was that he might be ill, or had a terrible night.

He was wearing a denim shirt and black jeans and was still handsome in the way that ageing rock stars are, slightly wrecked, but with the charm of a wild history saved by the adoration of flashbulbs. Or someone nuts about Jesus, a holy roller, wanting to convert you on the doorstep or redeem the world.

James had not seen her. He was transfixed by a distant sight, his face faraway and half-dreaming. He had the look of a man who had forgotten something important. Ellie would have found it difficult to approach had he been tracking her walk towards him.

She dived into the mock-watery world of the waiters, past the women with heads like baubles, bottle-blonde and puffed, past well-upholstered men, anticipating sozzled entertainments, past the sinuous fish-moves of figures with wine bottles wrapped in serviettes, and oversized plates held high, dodging and swerving. She emerged standing before him: well, here I am.

James was taken by surprise. He stood up quickly, bumping
the table. There was a moment of hesitation before he kissed her cheek, uncertain of how formally or informally to behave. ‘You haven't changed,' he said.

‘Nor have you,' she lied.

A waiter appeared from nowhere to pull out the chair and guide Ellie into it. He fluffed open a stiff serviette and let it fall onto her lap, as if she were an infant or in need of basic forms of assistance. With one hand behind his back he made a dainty ceremony of pouring a glass of water.

 

The past caved in on them. In each other's eyes they saw a dim, vertiginous slide backwards. Family. School. Small-town childhoods. The discontinuous histories each carried within them. They were part of that group for whom time past travels like a screen before them. In the opalescent day lay their shadowy hideout; in the chattering crowd a few preserved words.

Ellie thought:
no longer children.
She calculated the years that had intervened, and saw too that they were surely unknowable, each to each. Too much time between them, other lovers, other lives.

‘So, here we are.'

‘Yes,' Ellie said.

Oh God, she was thinking, I shouldn't have come.

But she was also thinking: it's really him. This was the James who had been a stubble-headed boy covered with blood, who had cried to see a scrawny chicken decapitated, who had been the clever one, the teacher's pet, always quick with the right answers, who had met her as a naked boy, nothing like a statue, in a filthy old foundry. She would have to make the effort for both of them. Why is it, she was thinking, it's always women who have to keep the conversation going and find the right words?

‘Here we are,' she repeated lamely.