Shade (12 page)

Bertie perhaps will drink too much, recall the time he danced with me between sets, remember my long pale neck and my reddened lips, but will say nothing of the evening he walked with me on the newly laid golf-course, lay in the sand at the bunker of the seventeenth hole and put his tongue between my teeth, only to be stilled to rigidity by the sight of my purple brassiere. “You can touch it if you want.” But no, Bertie didn’t, or couldn’t, lost that cowboy swagger when he walked off-stage, drove his hands into the sand instead, and watched the grains fall through his fingers.

“Dreadful,” Bertie will say, “only dreadful, a terrible thing, who would have thought it.” And Gregory will drink too much, but not as much as Bertie, renew acquaintance with the locals, his English accent gradually losing itself in the sough, the hum, the babble of talk. Worse things have happened of course in the intervening years: suicides, patricides, infanticides, new-born babies found in hayricks, Balbriggan burnt, not to talk of the South Quay Barracks. However my death will have the symmetry of detail, obey the tragic unities, of time, of place, of action.

But Gregory has long perfected the sublimation of emotion, the smoothing of it into a convenient shroud. He suffers only in his own time and in private. He suffered a war and rarely spoke of it, and now suffers a death and can barely speak of it. He finishes his whiskey and ginger ale, bids the company goodnight and makes his way, on admirably steady legs, towards the stairs with the wagon-wheel dangling from the ceiling. He mounts them towards the fourteenth and last room of the Wheel Inn, falls on the bed fully dressed and is instantly asleep.

Two hours later he is instantly awake again, the preternatural alertness too much alcohol can bring. He opens the window for fresh air, gazes across the fields at the distant house, framed by the desultory shapes of trees. He imagines for a moment I am gazing back at him, a pair of eyes behind the broken panes of glass, as restless, as unsatisfied as his.

And how can I explain my eye that is bloodless, fleshless, my sight that is constant, the dark that comes down and envelopes it but doesn’t let it sleep? How I am everywhere and nowhere? The moments I have lived unwind before with the moments unlived, both numbered by the same clock. I am your perfect narrator, inhabit then and now, dance between both, am nothing but my story and my story seems already endless. There are rules to my condition but I haven’t learned them yet, haven’t learned to cross the river to the dull sea that laps beyond it, can see but not reach that window open in that hotel across those fields, those desultory trees, can sense those eyes that stare towards mine in that insomniac room. A grave would have done the trick in a vampire story, in a tale of horror like the ones I once screamed in, would have given this consciousness rest and finality, the blankness of non-being. But being I have and substance none, and this man’s father was your father’s son. And he closes the windows then and unlike me, his half-sister, finally sleeps.

~

Would half ever become whole, she wondered, as Dan Turnbull drove them, Father, Mother, Gregory and Nina, towards Drogheda. A Saturday, the morning after he arrived, and maybe, she thought, half already had become whole since she couldn’t for the life of her remember a time all three of them had travelled together. He sat beside her in the back, Mamma and Father with Dan up in front, as Dan lazily nuzzled Garibaldi’s ears with the riding crop.

“Half,” she murmured, “that’s what I called you, Half.”

“Half what?” he asked. His clothes were stitched and restitched, the elbows of his jacket reinforced with leather patches. He had a tweedy homespun poverty about him that was genteel and lonely all at once.

“Just Half,” she said. She wondered, glancing slyly at the uncut hair that tufted over his back collar, how much his mother missed him. She decided it must be a lot.

“You’re my half-brother,” she said, “not my whole brother.”

“If that’s the case, then you’re not my whole sister either.”

“Then neither of us is whole.”

“No, we’re both halfs.” And she heard him giggle, for the first time.

“I would really hate to be a quarter,” he said, and it was her turn to laugh. She watched her father in front, the wind coursing off his greying hair, and knew he had heard their laughter and was pleased. Her mother beside him sat stiffly, apparently unconcerned.

She held her hand up towards him and said, “Let’s measure.”

“Measure what?” he asked.

“Hands, silly.”

So he held his hand up to hers and she saw how one fitted into the other, almost half the size.

“Half,” she said, “my hand is half of yours.” Then she dropped her voice, to create a bubble around them in the back that they couldn’t hear up front. “I can show you something in Drogheda, if you keep being nice.”

“What can you show me in Drogheda?” he asked, and he still pronounced the ‘ gh” wrong, which made her like him even more.

“I can show you,” she whispered, “the shrunken head of a saint that was chopped off by the English.”

“You’re trying to scare me again,” he whispered back and she squeezed his hand to assure him she wasn’t.

They made their way along the river past the warehouses and a smell of burnt butter filled the car from the margarine factory across the way.

“Does everything in Ireland smell?” he asked.

“Probably,” she said, “but I live here so I don’t notice. What does it smell like to you?”

“Fish.”

“That’s not fish,” she said, “that’s margarine from the margarine factory across the river.”

“Well, it smells like the fishmarket in Clerkenwell to me.”

Dan drew Garibaldi to a halt on the Quays and they got out and sure enough the air smelt of imminent rain and fish, and she wondered why she hadn’t smelt it before. And Father took his hand and Mamma took hers and they walked down Shop Street to Gallagher’s, where they replaced his overstitched jacket and his unevenly threaded trousers for smart new ones. Nina watched him with his hands held out while the Gallagher tailor marked his sleeves with chalk. She noted the fingers again, long and tapering, and when the jacket was back on the tailor’s dummy and the tailor was making adjustments, she took his hand and slipped him out of the side door, across the street, into the vast gloom of the cathedral.

“Do you pray?” he asked her.

“No,” she told him, “but I’m interested in martyrdoms.”

The cathedral seemed to whisper as they walked down the aisle but it was only, she noted, the murmur of prayers from the ladies bent over the wooden pews.

“You’re a Zoroastrian,” she said, again proud that she remembered each syllable.

“I didn’t say I was one. But I might be, some day.”

“Do Zoroastrians have martyrdoms?”

“I’m not sure what martyrdoms are.”

“Flayings,” she said, “quarterings, boilings and decapitations. Like there.” And she drew him towards the centre nave where under the glass casket the small shrivelled head lay.

“It’s black,” he said, “like a pygmy.”

“It’s only black,” she told him, “because it’s two hundred years old. And that’s why it’s shrivelled too. But the question you have to ask yourself is, if you were asked by Oliver Cromwell, do you believe in the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, and you knew they’d cut your head ofif if you said no, what answer would you give?”

“That sounds like a trick question,” he said, moving round the glass casket to
get
a better look. “I mean, does it matter what you believe once your head is cut off?”

“It does if you’re a martyr.”

“I thought if you’re a martyr your head was already cut ofif.”

“Clever clever,” she said, “I meant if you want to be a martyr.”

“I’m not sure I want to be a martyr,” he said.

So she led him back down the aisle and told him that if Miss Cannon asked him that question, his answer definitely was not the one to give.

They made it back to the draper’s when the last threads were being pulled from his new jacket.

“Where did you two
get
to?” her mother asked, and Nina saw that she avoided his eye.

“We went to the cathedral and said a prayer,” Nina lied, “didn’t we, Gregory?”

“We did,” said Gregory. “We gave thanks to God for my new family.”

Mother smiled tersely, caught his eye and looked away. Nina looked directly at him, hoping to catch him out in a smile, a giggle, an explosion of involuntary laughter. But Gregory returned her gaze with unsmiling lips, with expressionless green eyes, until his left eyelash fluttered down once, in a wink. And Nina returned his expressionless gaze and resolved to get him to teach her, as soon as possible, that fluttering wink.

George and Janie were waiting by the gates on the following Monday as she walked down with Gregory in his new jacket and trousers and his shiny shoes.

“This is Gregory, my brother,” Nina said grandly.

“You just got a brother?” George asked breathlessly. “How can you just get a brother?”

“He was posted from England, weren’t you, Gregory?”

And Gregory agreed, he had been sent from the depot for lost brothers via Royal Mail, arriving at our doorstep several days later.

“What’s it like to be posted?” George asked, while Janie tried to kick him into silence.

“The worst thing,” said Gregory, “is the taste of brown paper and the itching of the twine. Otherwise His Majesty’s postal service is a perfectly fine way to travel.”

Janie laughed then, unwillingly, and George laughed too, although in a way that revealed he didn’t really get the joke. “You’re a liar,” he said, “you weren’t posted.”

“I was,” said Gregory. “And to prove it, I still have the stamp in my pocket.” He reached into his pocket and Nina wondered how he was going to wriggle out of this one, but his hand came out with a stamp between two fingers, which he passed to George. George examined the stamp with forensic concentration as they walked between the hayricks towards Miss Cannon’s school. And once inside, as the class rose for prayers, Nina realised why Gregory would never have to face his martyrdom, when Miss Cannon excused him on the grounds that he was Protestant.

“C of E,” Gregory said. “It’s a different thing.”

“I think not,” said Miss Cannon, and so he sat while the class stood and sang their hymns to Mary.

“Why didn’t you say Zoroastrian?” Nina whispered through the hymn. He smiled up at her and hissed, “Because I haven’t decided.”

They took him to the mudflats of Mozambique after school, and surprised a heron in one of the stagnant pools. With his new shoes sinking in the browning mud, he seemed as exotic as that bird with its long neck and its dangling legs.

“Nobody is posted,” George said, returning to the theme, “I don’t believe you were posted.”

“I came by boat and train,” said Gregory, “but that’s the way the post travels, so I was posted in a way. Posted, but not wrapped.”

“Who posted you then?” asked George.

“My mother,” said Gregory, “licked a stamp and stuck it on my forehead and pinned the address to my coat.”

“What address?” asked Janie.

“My sister’s,” he said. “Nina’s.” And as it was the first time he had used the word sister, Nina felt an inordinate pleasure, a pleasure that seemed to creep up on her the way the mud oozed through her barefoot toes.

Mozambique proved to be inadequately mapped for him; the conceit of the nomenclature he found pleasing, but inordinately broad. If you have a Mozambique, he told them, you need a Zanzibar, you need a Congo, you need a Sudan, you need a Nile, a Kilimanjaro, a Sahara and an Indian Ocean beyond it. They already had a Sahara, they told him, and so he named the beating waves beyond the dunes of the Sahara the Indian Ocean, the two runnelled canals that bordered the mudflats he called the Nile and the Limpopo, and the stretch of scrub with the waist-high bushes became the Congo.

“Explorers,” he told George, “are quite specific about boundaries, and boundaries, once fixed, can never be altered.”

“So we’re explorers?” asked George, with all the tentative hesitation of one genuinely entering new territory.

“You can be an explorer or a native,” Gregory opined graciously. “It’s up to each individual.”

So George elected to be native, a choice he regretted when he learnt the lot of the native was to carry the goods and chattels of explorers and spent the rest of the afternoon burdened with four schoolbags, Janie’s, Nina’s, Gregory’s and of course his own.

“Is Cleopatra native?” Nina asked Gregory, since he had become a source of universal authority.

“Well now,” he sighed and stopped, and surveyed his vast and variegated kingdom.

“Cleopatra,” he said finally, “is a native queen and thus occupies a different category.”

“Fine,” said Nina, “then I’ll be Cleopatra.”

“You can’t,” he retorted, ever specific, “because we haven’t got an Egypt yet.”

“Yes we do,” she said, “how can you have a Nile without an Egypt, since the Nile runs into Egypt? So I’m Cleopatra and I’m going to look for Moses in the bulrushes on the banks of the Nile.”

So the boundaries that were to be fixed and never altered changed on an instant, and George found himself lumbered with an added burden, that of fanning Nina with a large dockleaf as she waded, dress held up above her knees, in her Nile, secure in the knowledge that her own fancy could sometimes match that of her new half-brother’s.

16

Y
ES, A GRAVE
would have done the trick in a horror film. A funeral beforehand, plumed horses moving towards a misty graveyard. And that Gregory has come for a funeral, a funeral lacking its grave, becomes evident the next day as he drives up once more to the sunlit gates with Brid, Emer and Granny Moynihan. They have buckets and mops and bleach and floor polish and a vacuum cleaner, which rattles in the boot. They assault the house with a vengeance, and as Gregory retreats from the gathering clouds of dust, Granny Moynihan mutters through her whiskered lips, “She deserves a proper house for a proper funeral, God rest her soul.”

Brid Moynihan wipes the grime off a Moreau cupid, bought in Francis Street, Dublin, restored in Aungier Street, the sculpted glass flambeau long broken, replaced by a bare bulb and a Chinese shade. She talks as she cleans, a fractured litany of gossip, about the body not found, the brother returned, the scandal in the townland when he first arrived, how the mother, God rest her soul, was the one they pitied.