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Authors: Gail Jones

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‘It takes patience,' Mam said. ‘It takes patience to see what is true in this world.'

Mam bought them each a keyring souvenir of the event, and some Lourdes holy water for Gran, and a little badge with Mary's face, but her children could tell she was mightily disappointed.

‘We didn't go in the right spirit,' she said softly. ‘Our hearts weren't open.'

Catherine hugged her mother and wished for her sake that the Virgin had danced a jig and blessed them all in a strident yawp. Or better still, just raised her white hand in a silent gesture, the way the priest does, quiet-like and calm and well-understood, at the shuffling, slightly sorrowful end of the holy mass. Just that: the simple, direct, loving code of the hand. It would have sufficed. It would have offered her mother meaning.

Mam hugged her back. It was a rare moment of concord.

Brendan also felt sorry for Mam. ‘It was me,' he said meekly. ‘I spoiled it for you.'

He glanced at Catherine to show that he cared for his mother, though she knew of his scorn and his atheism and his belief that Mam was merely gullible and had wasted their money. She loved her brother for that pretence, for trying to comfort Mam. And for the fact that he cared what his little sister thought.

 

In the evening Catherine saw her parents take a small glass of sherry together – another sign that all was not right with the world. Illnesses, wakes, these were the sherry occasions. They spoke together in low, hushed voices. Da smoked a cigarette. Catherine knew her mother was describing the trip and the nuns. She was telling him of the low-wattage halo and the little stalls selling trinkets; she was reconvening the details so they would make a good story. Da nodded and looked serious. In the yellow light of the kitchen there they were, her parents sharing a trip they could not afford, entering into the limited
circle of their own experience, having never moved beyond Ireland, and little beyond Dublin.

Only years later did Catherine realise what an important event this was for her mother, to journey with other souls to perform an act of witness, to see her own credulousness multiplied among the faithful, all looking at the same time in the same direction, all waiting for epic-scale confirmation and a fan of light from heaven. Afterwards, Mam spoke often of Ballinspittle, so that eventually the sense of failure fell away, and what replaced it was a tale of communal hope and the ardent wish to see something not on the telly. Her tone was solemn and prayerful:
ah, you should have seen them, all lookin' there together, all eyes fixed on her face, and the faith of it, and the love, even when the rain came down, and we all stood there together, patiently waiting, patiently waiting in the rain for her holy sign.

After Ballinspittle Catherine and Brendan were linked inseparably. It marked the understanding that they were truly alike. The older girls bothered her less, content to know Catherine was peculiar, and the youngest, Ruthy, only seven years old, was sure her big sister was special because she had been taken to see the statue. Catherine had given Ruthy the moving-Madonna keyring, and was pleased to see how treasured it was. Mam seemed to worry just the same, but practised a measured forbearance, apparently resigned. Catherine felt her relinquishment as a kind of relief; she was liberated now into a career of self-understanding.

 

Catherine paid for her drink and left the café. The dandelion fountain shone. She paused and gazed into it. A sixties' object for sure, when water features popped up everywhere in modernist cities, smoothing crude box-shapes and ugly façades, nostalgic for genuine and replaceable nature. This liquid dandelion stood alone, a memorial, perhaps. Not beautiful, exactly,
but buoyant somehow, light, luminous and strangely sensual. There was something in the falling of fine water drops that reminded Catherine obliquely of snow; and snow reminded her of the story Brendan loved above all others.

At his funeral she had read from James Joyce's
The Dead
. She had stood before the casket, in front of all those people, and Mam crying her eyes out, and her sisters with their hankies, and the priest just behind her, hovering with disapproval, and read the last paragraph of James Joyce's short story. The congregation in Our Lady of Victories looked distracted and confused. Some thought she was gone in the head to read out this something-or-other, blatant and disrespectful and certainly unreligious blather, but it was what Brendan would know, his literary world, and what he would have liked. And how did it go, now, the section about snow falling general, all over Ireland? Over the plain, over the hills, over the dark Shannon waves; then over the cemetery where the beautiful young man was lying buried? And that fellow, Gabriel his name was, looking out the window:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Upon all the living and the dead. This was how Brendan haunted her, visiting at unexpected moments, falling over her, as if from the sky, smoothing her own definition. So that Catherine might be rising from coffee in a good mood and remember his funeral, so that she might be walking in the sunshine in another country entirely, so that she might be heading for the Opera House or wishing she had written to her mother, and think suddenly, irresistibly, of the intimate presence of snow.

3

Their connection began when they were both nine, and together watched her father with the axe. Under the pepper tree he raised it high, and brought it down on a scraggly white chicken, which he had tied, just one loop, with a rope to the chopping block. Father was unsure of his aim, perhaps, or worried that the bird would flap away. But in the act itself there was no trace of uncertainty or worry, just irreproachable gravity and the blade fast-falling, just the
whoosh
of an intention sharper and heavier than most.

Only seconds before, the doomed chicken was making a throaty, moaning sound, inert but for its roving and nervous eye. Ellie saw it blink, and blink again, and wondered if chooks had thoughts or memories, or heard songs in their heads, as she often did. She held James's hand tightly and pulled him close. In the olive-green light of the backyard he looked nervous and afraid. His face was pinched, his mouth was firm, his brown eyes were moist and suddenly huge. Clouds flew above them, wind, a single bird.

Then the axe-blade fell. The chicken's head popped off – no big deal – but when her father untied the body a ghastly thing happened. The body writhed a little, uprighted itself, then lurched away in a swoony, directionless run. James laughed, but looked terrified. As the headless chicken ran past
he bent down and swooped it into his arms. He clutched hard, trying to still it, trying to make the lively body die. His eyes entreated – who knows what? – and filled with tears. Ellie could hear her own rapid breathing and knew that time was rocking into shape as water does, pooling around this boy's face and his blazing desperation.

When her father prised the chicken from James's grip his shirt was bloody and bespattered. The boy shook and began to cry, and Ellie opened her arms and took him gently into her child's embrace. She knew then, even with her own heart galloping and her senses all alive, that she was the calm one, that in the circle of killing she could watch and somehow know not to recoil. She knew too that there was a gap between death and life, a remnant vigour, a kind of puzzled searching.

Do humans search like this, looking stupidly for what is missing? Would a human body run? Crazy-like, with no head?

Ellie was possessed by this idea, its exhilarating horror. As an adult it will occur to her that this was her first moment of philosophy, when she found in the world a seductively bamboozling question. Yet in the vast stillness of the moment she saw the answer in James's face:
yes
, crazy-like-with-no-head, a human would still search.

 

Ellie decided to walk to Central Station, take the train to the quay, and then return on the bus. She wanted this walk downhill through the Saturday crowds, already trailing out of coffee shops and cycling past with the newspapers, already responding with like heart to the glorious weather. Faces evanesced before her, rose up and fell away, and she thought of the negligent flicker of perception that negotiates any crowd, of how in the champagne morning light they were all caught in flux and lustre, igniting, appearing, lit with energetic purpose. In the grounds of the local primary school a market was being estab
lished; Ellie could see stallholders setting up trestle tables and unpacking their wares. They were holding cardboard cups of coffee and lightly chatting. It would be a good day. Even from across the road you could hear optimism ringing in their voices. But Ellie was still thinking of James at nine years old, and of herself, self-centred. She hadn't really cared for his suffering. She had wanted high drama.

 

Her mother was suddenly there, surveying the mess. ‘Bloody hell,' she said, ‘what were you thinking, Charlie?' Ellie noticed her father become submissive at his wife's reproach. He was still holding the chicken, its feathers mucky with gore, the event a crude wreckage, and the head forgotten, ridiculous, in the sawdust beside the block. Ellie saw him pass the upside-down carcass from one hand to the other, then wipe his left hand on his trousers, leaving a faint greasy smear. They exchanged words, her parents, and then her mother seized James by the wrist and dragged him away. Ellie saw in her mother's glance that she was also stained; holding James she had printed chicken blood onto her clothes. So there was the blood-print, the sky, her father dangling the chicken. Images lined up for her memory, for the future, for wild or idle surmise, this little collection that made up the blunder of the moment, and of James's pure fear, and of her own shameless sense of triumph.

In this pause lay the inkling of a net of relationships. Ellie registered with sure judgement the range of her affections: she loved them all –
loved
– her mother, her father, her school-friend James, all of them caught in this drama with the headless chicken that would not do the right thing and straightaway, as it should, just lie down and die.

 

Ellie was in the kitchen, dressed in a clean cotton blouse. She had tucked her hair behind her ears, and sat silent, watching,
fiddling with the hem of her skirt. James had been on his knees, vomiting into a plastic bucket, but was now perched on their high stool, not yet settled, with a glass of water in his hands and her mother leaning towards him. She was soothing, whispering words that Ellie could not quite hear. They would be the right words; her mother was good at that. They would be words gathered from the air, or so it had always seemed, and fitted into just the right sentences, in just the right order, and spoken just right, like a special trick, like the way a dog knows when to nuzzle you and when to stay far away. She recognised the low tone of voice and the lovely comfort residing there. James was hectic with crying and barely consolable. He had the glazed look of a child too small for the enormity of all he'd seen. His shoulders hunched, he trembled a little. Ellie's mother plucked at a box of tissues and handed him fat, floral bunches.

Like James, Ellie was a single child. She learnt only as an adult of the brother who preceded her, dying of infant leukaemia at the age of four. William, his name was. Her parents had never spoken of William, but their devotion to her was his ghostly bequest. They loved her double and found her existence adorable. Ellie watched her mother's attention as she calmed James and offered him an arrowroot biscuit, as he nibbled around its edges, like a storybook rabbit, as he brushed the crumbs away, like a girl, she thought meanly, like a scaredy-cat girl, and began gradually to see where he was and what a bother he had made.

In her watching Ellie glimpsed her mother's power, this remaking of damaged things and events within words, this placing of sentences, carefully, as a balm over a wound. At last her mother straightened. She lifted James under the armpits, hoisted him upwards and straightened him too.

‘Time to go home,' she said. She untied her apron, folded it swiftly, and held an arm out to show that Ellie was allowed to accompany them. The kitchen light was pale yellow; it was
always yellow in the kitchen. Every kitchen in the world, thought Ellie, is always yellow. James and her mother both had round yellow faces.

 

They had walked the gravel road of their seaside town, passing Mr Anderson-with-the-large-belly who was outside watering his garden, flailing the plastic hose, this way and that, like a private game or an emblem of his own distraction; past the Covichs' (who were divorced) and the Hallidays' (who were Catholics), and the Maloufs' (who were from Lebanon, wherever that was), past the empty block in which Patterson's Curse flourished its purple blossoms (Dad said it could kill horses, so Ellie thought it magnificently dangerous), to the end of the street, where there was only James's house, an unrepaired weatherboard, half-falling down, with holes in the roof that let the rain in (James had told her) and beyond that, the sand dunes, the coast, and the true-blue Indian Ocean. The house had a wretched, decomposing look, as though it was caught in a process of unmaking that affected no other house on the street. The verandah had planks of wood missing and a broken rail, and an iron roof, rusted orange, that was peeling away. One of the side-walls was crudely patched with a warped sheet of three-ply. It looked like a blister, just hanging there. A surprisingly vigorous rosemary bush grew by the letterbox. Ellie watched her mother tear a woody stem in an absentminded gesture, rub the little leaves together and sniff at her fingers as she passed.

When Mrs DeMello opened her door she saw only a blazon of red. She let out a cry and fell to her knees before her son, then reached and pulled his thin body towards her face.

‘He's not hurt,' mother said quickly. ‘It's not his blood.'

But Mrs DeMello sang: ‘oh Dio, Dio, Dio.'

‘Chicken,' mother added, in what must have been an incomprehensible explanation. But still Mrs DeMello did not
acknowledge the visitors. She buried her face in her small son's belly. Ellie was excited to see a grown-up so disarrayed. It was a kind of guilty pleasure; the sight of Mrs DeMello weeping, even before she knew what had happened, and the way her face reshaped, and James staring dizzily ahead, mystified, unfocused, embarrassed by his mother's possessive display.

‘Italians are different,' mother said later. ‘They have passions,' she added. Ellie would wonder over this statement for the next few years.

But then she saw that burst of feeling as something she might desire. To be clutched at like that. To be seized by an adult as if you might be the one to save them. Ellie glimpsed behind Mrs DeMello her orderly house. Although ramshackle outside it was impeccably tidy inside. There were doilies on every surface and plaster ornaments of lap-dogs and prancing horses and figures in puffy historical dress, rimmed in stiff lace. There was a Jesus on the wall, showing off his lolly-pink heart, and an old velour armchair with a crocheted cream cover. In so ruined a space lay foreign oddity and decorative excess.

‘Oh Dio, Dio, Dio.' Still chanting, still distraught.

Then at once Mrs DeMello rose up, uttered a hasty thank-you, smothered in tears, and pulled James inside. She banged shut the door.

‘Well I never,' said Ellie's mother. ‘You can't tell with some people.'

As they left Ellie grabbed at the rosemary bush, twisting free a twig. She crushed it as her mother had done, and breathed in its scent.

‘Rosemary,' her mother said casually. ‘Rosemary for remembrance.'

 

Afterwards James did not talk to Ellie for three years. Mostly he was alone, but for a time, when he was eleven, he hung
out with the tough kids, the bully, Col Harper, and Kev Andrews and Blue. Ellie saw how James used his wit to entertain them and didn't squirm when they gave him Chinese burns or knuckle-punched him in the upper arm. They liked to whack other kids behind the knees, so that you buckled and fell forward and were scared they might kick you when you were down. For a while she seemed to see them everywhere, skinny boys with mean streaks, in their striped T-shirts like their hearts, Ellie thought, remembering those comic books in which prisoners wear stripy pyjamas. They were rowdy and rude, a collection of trouble-makers. They invented war games and shot at each other and died rolling in the dirt, clutching their bellies, scowling with enjoyable, make-believe agony. They chucked stones on old Mrs Taylor's roof and ran away laughing when she came outside. They spat on the ground and looked at their gobs of spittle, proud. They were cheeky in shops and morose in the classroom, swearing under their breath, glowering, planning insurrections.

‘Dickhead!' they shouted at the old metho drinker, Merv, who lay half insensible in the park that was only weeds and pussy tails and a tall lonely monument to the First World War. ‘Shitface dickhead!'

Ellie felt sorry for Merv. And since in her home no bad language was allowed, she was transfixed by the swearwords, flung spinning into the sky, and by the cruelty of the boys and their bold bad behaviour.

But she also missed James. Until the chicken and the botched slaughter he had been her best friend. She missed what had precariously existed between them, secrets, mostly; secret talks and words and sly imaginings. She knew James wanted to be a pilot when he grew up, so that he could see the world from the sky, he said, and go out across oceans, far, far away, where people were more interesting. He might even visit Italy, where his
parents were from, and where he could speak the lingo and see the Coliseum in Rome. ‘Two thousand years old, Ellie,' he had whispered, ‘just imagine that. Two thousand years.' James wanted to go back in time, to find another history. Ellie would go forward and be a movie star, she dreamily confided, kissed by handsome men wearing hats and speaking American. Their ambitions were like stories they might some day live by. Ellie thought of a flashlight, its ray erratic in foggy darkness, seeking a pathway. And her own footfall, a child-searcher, sounding as she went.

James had peered into Ellie's face. She knew he saw her freckles and her sunburn and her stringy brown hair, but he did not mock or denigrate or suggest that her dream was impossible. ‘I'll speak American too,' he said, leaning close, ‘and I'll fly to California, whatever, or to China or Czechoslovakia, and look down from the sky, from way up high. And you can wave, and I'll see you, and I'll wave back; and it will be a kind of spy-code we have, with no one else knowing …'

 

Extraordinary to surrender like this, to so cogent a memory. To have her young self returned to her, and the particulars of one day.

It was a trance Ellie walked in, with all the welter of details – the spluttering fear of Mrs DeMello that for years, absurdly, would denote ‘Italian passion', the marriage drama of her parents, one submissive, one strong, the vision of James's face, all alarm and pure shock; and more than that the improbable density of moments she'd not thought of for years – it was an oval-shaped arrowroot biscuit he nibbled, it was a chicken's death, horribly messed, that had shattered their friendship, and all the blood it sent flying, all the irrevocable filth, and James's over-reacting misery and sense of contamination. It was – could this be so? – the mustard-coloured walls of their kitchen that cast everything of that era in yellow light, and the listed names
of their neighbours that tinted the yellow memories with affection. And it was the ‘Dio, Dio, Dio', a terrible song, that broke through to this white morning and into the hurrying present.

BOOK: Five Bells
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