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Authors: Gail Jones

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BOOK: Five Bells
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Pei Xing did not enjoy this train journey and often buried herself in reading. But motion she liked. She liked a sense of moving forward.

Catherine Healy woke that morning to dazzling light. To be in a city so shining. A city so bright. She stood on the small balcony, enwreathed by warm air, her face lifted to the sunshine. There never was a light like this in Dublin. Not on the sunniest day.

Catherine had woken by eight in the apartment in Darlinghurst, which was situated, obscured, behind a vast Coca-Cola sign. There was a glimpse of William Street, leading to the city, but no Harbour view. Here, everyone asked:
do you have a Harbour view?

She wanted to ring Luc just to say: my, but the sun shines! And by dark there's this billboard, old-fashioned kitsch, a fluorescent wall of shifting crimson stripes and curly white lettering, like something from an all-American movie, directed by Altman … and it stands out for miles and miles, my own personal landmark, my own electric advertisement … and who would have thought it, a girl from the Pearse Tower, a girl from Ballymun …

 

In the air hung diesel fume and petrol stink and the roar of traffic streaming down and up the slope of William Street, to and from the centre. Catherine had been in Sydney for only two weeks, and her accommodation was borrowed and temporary. Someone from the newspaper office where she worked had invited her to flat-sit; she would soon need to begin looking for a place of her own. But in the meantime she liked this fake version of camping, living with unfamiliar furniture and knick-knacks, and someone else's clothes hanging in the wardrobe. It was like a holiday, or a dream, or something that allowed her to feel contingent and uncommitted. When she thought of her four sisters and her mother back in Dublin, and her dear brother Brendan, God-rest-his-soul, she believed she was the free one. The only one who had escaped.

Catherine rose, showered, and pulled a loose indigo sundress over her head. She surveyed herself in the mirror briefly and decided against lipstick. She would have breakfast on Macleay Street, then walk back to the train station. She would visit Circular Quay, she would become a Saturday tourist, she would acquire a sun-tan.

 

Beside a fountain that resembled a dandelion, a sphere of rent water, ablaze and extravagant, Catherine drank a glass of soy latte and picked at a flaking croissant. There was a waitress in
black trousers and dreadlocks who was casually chirpy and a clientele of good-looking, mostly youngish couples, the kind who start the day at the gym, or walking fast with a tiny dog. Tracksuits, ponytails, a perky little cap – they were everywhere, this tribe, in Ranelagh and Rathgar, in Camden and Notting Hill, in Potts Point in the sunshine with the Saturday papers.

Catherine would sit here quietly considering her good fortune, as though some part of her felt it was ill-deserved, like a lottery win, mere chance, that made her instantly enriched. She enjoyed the astonishing weather and the nature of her freedom. Might a migrant feel this way? For all that trailed behind, lost families and countries, there was a sense too that a new sky might cast a light of revelation. The fountain beside Catherine blinked and she found it a contemplative object. Mammy would love this. And Mary. And Philomena. And Claire. And Ruthy. Especially Ruthy. And Brendan too, before the accident took him and he ended up, before his time, at Glasnevin Cemetery.

Catherine experienced a momentary longing for sponge cake and potatoes, saw the ring road stretch out, all grey desolation and over-sized lorries, charging devil-may-care through rain-slick and blur.

 

The man sitting closest to Catherine flapped open his paper and she glimpsed the front page. Another bombing somewhere. This much she knew, that there were always bombings. On Catherine's tenth birthday, 12th October 1984, the IRA bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton, hoping to assassinate Margaret Thatcher, and her birthday was ever after linked to this history, usurped, really, by politics and men and the absolute shite of all that bombing. For days it was in the papers and on the television screen – five dead, nothing of course compared to Iraq now – but Catherine discovered then how all she had longed for on her birthday meant nothing in the wider scheme of things.
Being the second youngest of five sisters was bad enough; she would always feel overwhelmed by the designs of others. But this was the day she began to think about Irish politics, to think about a history that was other than Irish-eyes-a'smilin'. She and Brendan, who were close, though he was five years older, huddled together imagining the birthday death of Margaret Thatcher and considering like grown-ups the meaning of life.

A few months earlier Brendan had marched against the visit of President Reagan to the village of Ballyporeen. Catherine was the only one at the dinner table who spoke in Brendan's support, even though she did not really understand what the demonstration was about. Mam slammed down the serving spoon on the tablecloth and said
there will be no politics in my house!
And Da had just sat there, eating his peas, and the others had all giggled.

Brendan and Catherine were the serious ones, the clever ones, Mam said, when she was in a better mood. Brendan was on the television; you could see him in O'Connell Street, shouting at the top of his voice with the other rascals, making a holy show of himself and wanting to be famous. He was shouting that Reagan was a warmonger and feckin evil and would bring Star Wars to the world, zapping innocents from the sky. Catherine was thrilled to see him there, in the streets, doing something noisy in the centre of Dublin. Familiar city images flashed past, and before them his face, floating in a crowd whose mouths opened and closed in unison.

Her big brother, ah lovely, and with the gift of the gab.

A few days later Brendan showed her a newspaper article that said Reagan had presented a paperweight to the Irish President: he thought this hilarious. He mimed the presentation, put on an incompetent American accent and mocked the weightiness of what was needed to hold down the bothersome papers of the state. Catherine had to shush Brendan when his laughing became hysterical – Mam would want to know what they found so funny.
But it was a wonderful moment, when they knew their complicity, when they leant against each other's bodies and decided wordlessly and instantly, in sibling love and in the apprehension of a shared future, that they might form a team.

 

In Sydney, people on the streets seemed contented and relaxed. Perhaps it was the sunshine. Perhaps sad people hid. Catherine thought of the fourteen-year-old mothers begging at the end of O'Connell Bridge, their pallid skinny babes resting sideways in their laps, and decided there's nothing of this here, no girls ruined before their time, or none that were obvious anyway, not sitting where everyone could see them, showing off their sorry lives. There were no frazzled wives with vertical lines between their eyes, standing in cold slanting rain outside Dunnes Stores, moaning with their shopping. Or those who had made it in IT, sweeping the city in sleek European cars; or the tough-looking men with shaved heads and leather jackets and south Dublin confidence.

Catherine realised that she was missing her home. Even though she had been living in London since she was twenty-two, Dublin, which she visited annually, was still her default comparison. She had left Ireland just after the murder of the investigative reporter, Veronica Guerin, when she decided journalism would be better pursued abroad. Here now, her comparisons were still with her own city. In the Holy Spirit School she was always the top student in her class, just as Brendan was, in the Holy Cross, and some time around her tenth birthday they both knew they would leave. Catherine lived in anticipation of the day she would take the ferry at Dun Laoghaire and sail over the waters. Away from her entangling sisters and the misery of Ballymun housing, away from North Dublin sorrow, which was unlike any other, away from the ring road that strangled them and lassoed them all in. To dirty London, as it turned out. City-
of-Sin, Mam called it. City-of-Sin. But it had to be better, they reasoned, better than dreary Ballymun.

 

Catherine ordered a second coffee. The dandelion fountain was surprisingly captivating. White ibis with curved black beaks long as a scythe, and potbellies, like old men, were treading the puddles beneath the fountain, unmindful of café-goers and shoppers passing by. You could kick them like a football if you were so inclined, since they barely flinched as human legs passed their way.

Two young travellers, probably from Sweden – blonde girls with skimpy shorts, tanned legs and exclamatory manners – took turns having their photos taken in front of the dandelion. Carefree, the word was. Their parents were probably executives of Volvo or owned rental property in Iceland and were off now, on a yacht, sailing a sparkling fjord, communicating only sparsely and by electronic mediation. But Catherine had dragged her past and her family with her. They hung around. She thought of them often and with a kind of doleful, compelling concern. Most of all she thought of Brendan, though he was no longer in the world, and it was a riddle to her how powerfully the dead continued, how much space they took up with their not-here bodies. Brendan lay trapped in her atoms and in the folds of her brain, he had infiltrated, somehow, the way damp entered the clammy rooms of those stinky old flats in Dublin, leaving blotches like blossoms and streaks going nowhere.

Catherine would ring her mother soon, or perhaps send a postcard of the Opera House. Or of the Bridge, or Bondi Beach, or a cute kangaroo, aerodynamically leaping. Filial piety, that's what Father Maroney would call it.
Dutiful daughter.

 

Last Saturday, her very first in the new southern world, Catherine swam in the ocean. Instead of heading off to see the monuments,
she had decided to find holiday indulgence and enjoy the hot weather. She watched children leaping in the surf and sun-worshippers posing their brown bodies, stretched unselfconscious, on the new-moon arc of Bondi sand. It had been a day awash with light, rather like this one, and the sound of the sea falling onto the shore was nothing like home, but a kind of joyous
plash!
as the water curled and foamed and dispersed, a blue muscle, turning, and a commodious body one might rest in. She wondered if this was how sex felt for a man, to be surrounded, to be held, to be dashed somewhere, gasping.

Luc, she decided, would love Bondi Beach. All that flesh and the mystery of such an immersion, one's body buoying, the currents, the kiddie-excitement of a breaking wave.

She had seen the body-surfers flying prone on the angle of a swell, following the ridge of the water, their heads bonneted by froth. Energy and massive churn pulled them to the shore. She had seen children no older than eight fly towards her on blue boards. They lay on their bellies and held out their heads like turtles, and smiled as they fled past. Everyone's face was bright; everyone glistened and was animated.

And she had seen a woman her age swim directly towards the horizon, her arms turning in assured and rhythmical strokes. There was a moment of envy; to swim like that. And a moment of terror. To go so far out, to push the body into distance. As she lolled in the churning shallows Catherine resolved to take swimming lessons. She would be
that
woman, on a kind of journey, going far out into the ocean.

 

In the summer of the year following Catherine and Brendan's political deal, their mother took them to the village of Ballinspittle, to see the moving Madonna. Not the others, just them. They needed a miracle, Mam said, to show them back to the Way.

Children in the village had witnessed the outdoor statue of Mary opening and closing her eyes and moving her hands in the tiniest wave, and their fervour and testimony attracted pilgrims by the thousand. All over Ireland people had heard of this marvel, and then all over the world. Some said Our Lady had actually taken a step forward, in a diamond of white light, radiant with grace; others that it was a nod or a blink or a wee tilt of the head, a body-message to the faithful. The Spirit was among them; it had only to be witnessed.

On an overcast day in July, Mam, Catherine and Brendan boarded a chartered bus full of nuns to take them to the miracle in County Cork. Brendan and Catherine sat together at the back of the bus, feeling ill with the journey and shuddery with every bone-shaking jolt of the road, and were surprised by how loudly the nuns chattered and the topics of their conversation. Mam sat up the front with an old biddy and looked particularly pious. It felt like forever.

When they arrived in Ballinspittle they found the place invaded: ‘Every Irish eedjit is here,' whispered Brendan; ‘every sad fuckin headcase.' Pilgrims were everywhere, spilling out of cars and buses. A public address system, from which prayers were broadcast, was in full crackly voice. There were little stalls, selling holy objects made of plastic, and toilets set up at the base of the statue. The Virgin Mary was disappointing, truth be told. A figure in cast concrete, ringed with eleven light-bulbs that signified her halo, she stood quietly in her little grotto, twenty feet up, and seemed obdurately disposed not to move at all. Catherine and Brendan stood where they were told and looked up at the statue. But nothing moved. They stood for ages and ages, with Mam looking too, and stood even when rain began to fall and others went for shelter.

BOOK: Five Bells
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