Lark's Eggs (18 page)

‘Then came the real armies. In a city where the houses were armies, the eyes of houses in the hills, to encounter the real armies was to meet a ghost. Faces were painted out. It was all part of a logic; the grave too was part of a logic. Wreaths were wrapped in newspaper that would otherwise have held fish and chips and placed together with the news of local commandants in the paper, by wet grave slabs in Milltown cemetery. I remember one wreath of flowers, little pink and red flowers, miniature flowers, almost plastic flowers. It was a woman with a scarf on her head who laid this wreath for her son, a schoolfriend of mine. We were given berets and flags to compensate for the dead.'

Once or twice I pulled Raymond up, asking him what he meant by something or another and that stopped him really, so to fill in the gap, his white shirt catching the gleams of a candle we considered appropriate for the occasion, I mustered everything I had and took off where he stopped, in a mustard cardigan, arms folded, telling my life story as I concentrated on a pound of butter that had slipped into the shape of Croagh Patrick on the table.

‘Where do I begin? Let's see. Let me rack my brains. Brown bogs. Creaking, spinning bicycles. Milk churns. Girls were solicitous about scapulars. Geese were coy. I shared a secret with the heavens.
I was to be sainted one day. Girls rummaged through bogs. Girls were friends until men came along. Girls stooped and lacquered their shoes with rival cream. There was a picture of Maria Goretti in our sitting room among millions of seashells and small pigeon feathers glued on the wall, and despite the fact that she was sainted for resisting the advances of a man, girls in newly laundered dresses and with new hairdos, before going to dances, fell on their knees in front of her and hands raised high in prayer begged her not to allow them to be shipwrecked in the jostle for a good man on the ballroom floor of their fledgling years.'

Funerals at first seemed to be the only point of contact between my discourses and Raymond's; hearses galloping through the brown marshes of Mayo, hearses, piled with their fill of flowers, languishing through Belfast. But the point of contact widened to an abstract and unstated notion which united us. This house was like the Irish flag. It brought a part of the green and a part of the gold together. It was the peaceable white between. I'd never before spoken at length with someone from the other part of my island. This city with its sleeping November dustbins afforded me the opportunity to do just that. This house was like a cavern of lost history lessons; nuns squawked with news of imminent invasions. In my dreams Raymond kept coming towards me. He came out of the white of the Irish flag. Reflections of water rippling on his face. Cowslips somewhere in the vicinity and the winnowing of the Irish flag sometimes wringing the sound of classical music. He came out of the tender things of my childhood. Like the fluttering of the flag he was caught in the act of motion; the expectation of his arrival was never met by his arrival. He was a part of me caught for years in the act of approaching and with all the attendant vagueness of line that entailed.

‘A lad brought me out of a dance one moonlit night and
confessed
to me his ambition was to be a missionary priest in a Central American republic where the people would have to come to him for advice about revolution and sewers but first he had to do
you-know-what
with a young lady. So he asked me if I'd oblige him and lift my skirt. I said “No thanks, Father,” slapped his face, pushed him into a moonlit brook and wished him luck with the holy revolutions in South America.'

 London was the lifting of a weight; it was shuffling the
Concise
Oxford Dictionary at Maida Vale library; it was acquainting
myself
with the linear lonely hearts columns; it was paying a visit to a family-planning clinic and having something stuck in me. There I baulked. I returned to ‘Elysium' and in the tradition of my mother baked a loaf of brown bread and kept repeating a phrase I
concocted
for Raymond a few nights previously: ‘No white stale bread here as in Central America, Father. No white stale bread here as in Central America, Father.'

Gulls lolled over the grey Edwardian houses as if waiting for white bread. They got graffiti. Some of the graffiti was by my fellow countrymen. ‘Life to those who understand and fuck the begrudgers.' My own language had become less auspicious. Black girls were trapped in red telephone kiosks. My children had improvised a
seesaw
among the syringes outside and I ordered them in once or twice. But there was more than just the grey outside to rescue them from. A creature halfway between the bygone hippie and the punk who was to come a few years later pulled himself along; the backs of Afghan coats had become lathery and polemical ex-public-school boys enlivened the world of Marx with candy-pink shoes. But
confronting
the grey outside one day I knew I could easily
accommodate
myself to it and all its ensuing threats; ‘for better or for worse' as a green-toothed priest had spat at my white, backswept crown of a veil once—it was to be home. 

 When I went to post that letter the mailbox refused to accept
it. Aunt Bethan was a spinster aunt who lived alone in a big house by the river outside Ballina. She was the only one of my relatives I liked. As a child I'd been fascinated by the silver pointed pins in her pouch-like grey velvet hats.

‘Why did I leave Belfast? You've got to leave, haven't you? It's one of the laps along the way. What am I going to do now? Don't know. Oh yes.' Raymond was going to say something but stopped. ‘Redbrick cottages building into a palace. That's the dream. My father used always to want to eat cornflakes on Coney Island. It was a name that stuck in his head. Me?' Raymond shrugged. ‘The funny thing about red-brick cottages under low mountains is that they kill me's.'

My children brought bread and honey to the genii in the lower room as offerings. We visited London Zoo; we visited big stores in which premature Santas had already made an appearance. But Raymond dominated. He never went out. He'd come with the house. He just sat surrounded by books and devouring their contents like a rat. Once or twice in the café of a big department store, a red tartan skirt on me, in sudden exultation I imagined, as in a Hollywood movie, Raymond, the other side of the table, clenching the white and tender part of my wrists mouthing some sublimity that made everyone in the café perk up and listen, his hair falling, a blond fluency—the colour of Raymond's hair fluctuated from dark to fair. But of course he never ventured out to make such a scene real. I'm sure he would have clenched my wrists like that had he come out. Not in any romantic way. We were friends now. Mates.

A gull spiralled into the air above our mansions, a festive eddying of a white uprising streamer. The gull climbed to a point where he could see all London. I had a part-time job now and
Raymond
when I went out looked after the children.

Raymond did go out. He came with us on our second visit to London Zoo. He wore a crocheted hat over his ears—one of mine—and he pointed to a polar bear on a grey November day and said that he'd always wanted a nose like a polar bear's, a nose that was so solemn and pacific.

I could not fully cope with our relationship on the level of the real so I created the fantastic; anyway our relationship always had buried in it an element of fantasy. I was the girl in the red tartan
skirt in the house; he kept coming towards me. I was off to America. The smell of pristine new land, its riverside firs and its sluggish, congenial rivers already in my nostrils. But I was being separated from the boy I loved. For some reason there were always a dozen kegs of beer in the kitchen beside me so the smell of porter invaded the smells of the fir trees and unhurried waters. Raymond was always in white. That was his colour. And his hair was white. My arms were always waiting but he was entranced in a slow, continually revolving motion. I'd woken once or twice to find tears on my rich and ornate Foxford rug.

The winos up the road burned their house down. They came running out in the middle of the night, tails of their coats on fire but bottles of Guinness still outheld. Cormac Fitzmaurice was seen to be waltzing with a hot water jar on the opposite pavement,
gurgling
to his dancing partner that it was he who'd started the fire. As if to validate his Nero claims his cheeks were smudged in red
lipstick
and red lipstick daubed his lips. There were red smears on the hot-water jar. But Rome did not burn down that night. Just the house. As he danced Cormac had a litre bottle of whiskey sticking out of his pocket. The label had messages scribbled in red biro on it. A woman with a youngish face, her hair white as a bog cotton under a mauve chiffon scarf, her hands deep in the pockets of her plush whitish coat, then began screaming, affirmedly facing the house, that she was the culprit. A competition ensued between her and Cormac, who'd stopped dancing, the two of them looking at the burning house, Cormac revealing that he'd loved setting houses on fire since he was a child and he'd once incinerated alive an aunt and her two trimmed white poodles in her house in Blackrock, County Dublin. The children claimed they saw three burning rats perched on the roof of that house against the multiple stars and frenzied sparks that night.

A bomb went off in England. It tore through the entrails of the media. Many young people were killed. It ruptured the bowels of consciousness. We picked our way in a different planet for a few weeks. A Pakistani girl at school prodded Mícheál's bum with a
compass
and venomously informed him he was a murdering Paddy and should return to where he came from. I maintained queenly dignity 
at work—gracefully mopping floors—bald managers stooped towards me. Well it wasn't me who planted the bomb. What about the beam in your own eye? But the structure of my house was impaired. The landscape of England was transformed. Biting winds were said to have crept down motorways and isolated motorway cafés. A hideous orange light had overtaken everything. It glared in at night. Escaping it I descended to the cellars to try to discover the truth.

‘The English invaded Ireland in the twelfth century and they've been a bloody nuisance ever since. They ruined the crops and
ransacked
convents.' An elderly, fragile nun at school contorted during history lessons. ‘Mind you there were some decent Protestants. Theobald Wolfe Tone being one such. To him is the credit of the Irish flag, green, white and gold. Green for Catholic. Gold for Orangeman. White for a true and lasting peace between.'The only orange I saw was the orange of the light outside; it even changed the colour of Raymond's white dotted shirt as he crouched sacrosanctly on the floor. ‘Let us all pray, girls, for a United Ireland.'Theobald Wolfe Tone slouched along Sutherland Avenue in an old manky coat, a newspaper cutting dripping from his pocket.

‘My mother did not love my father but she married him. My father did not love my mother but he married her. My mother loved me but I was kidnapped by uncles with republican eyes. The annual Wolfe Tone commemoration was a great event. My uncles would get drunk in a nearby pub and start pissing on the other graves. That was the great festive point of the year. Pissing on graves in the
cemetery
Wolfe Tone was buried in. There was a little bridge over a brook nearby and in a short blue coat I'd run off there. I met a cow there once and we performed a pantomime together while the Wolfe Tone commemoration speeches were being made.'

The odd thing about Raymond was that since this bombing his load had lightened a bit; he'd begun telling foul jokes, he quoted poetry freely. The children loved his telling of stories. He'd got them from a grandmother who lived in a house in the Antrim mountains, he told them.

‘My grandmother was Scottish really. She had boots in her voice, black boots. Children, we gathered. Her stories were of ghouls and headless men. She emphasized the blood around the rings of the
headless men's necks. As a girl she'd been lifted to and fro on gentle waves by currachs. She was in a different land now and rewarded the natives with monstrosities.'

Where Raymond's granny came from there was a church; a Catholic church. The faith had been preserved there but the statues were unusually bloody. Christs with blood streaming from their wounds, Marys with blood congealed at their hearts and in their heavenward-gazing eyes. Always a story of moving from one place to another, the currachs on gentle waves eventually bringing them to waves of a more turbulent kind.

‘There was a giant who lived in a castle on the edge of blackbog.' I became one of the children. I listlessly filed in for Raymond's story. Raymond's granny had made many shirts, embroidered them, so I bought a white shirt, and embroidered it blue for Raymond's birthday. A new shirt. A new human being. We dipped into wine and sang. December the tenth. It was drawing towards Christmas. I didn't send any Christmas cards to Ireland.

Raymond in an off-white embroidered shirt, serious creases in the shirt; his birthday. I had cut his hair, it had solemnized his head; candlelight caught and fiddled with gold locks. Raymond looked out—beyond the swooning candles what did he see? Mexico, Italy, Morocco. It was a time for currachs again but this time currachs would land in uncustomary blue waters.