The Nightside of the Country

by Meaghan Delahunt

  Common sense is overrated, I says to them.

  My own way is slow, odd; not methodical, I’m the first to admit. I don’t possess what ye’d call a logical mind. I need to feel my way into a situation. To imagine my way in. I have good visual and spatial memory, for sure. I’ve never forgot a face, which has been my salvation, and not only my salvation, many a time. I always had a steady hand and a keen eye. Good focus. But the thing they never took into consideration, not my ma or da, not the nuns, not the comrades even, was this: lessons learnt the hard way are the lessons that stick. Nothin about this life came easy, but when it came for me – and it came for me young: yer man X, life on the move, gaol, the hunger, solitary – what I could draw on was more than the common sense. I could draw on the imagination. I could draw on reserves of the soul. I could draw on the birds flown over the prison yard; see in them all sorts of future and past. Read their arcs through the sky. And then, over time, after I’d proved myself, handled the weapons, moved the guns, covered my tracks, survived, they’d all been forced to change their tune.

  You don’t untie a knot by cuttin through it, I says to them.

  That first day, after I prise myself from the gift shop and the tartan tat and make my way to the hotel, the rain still teeming, I feel strange and alone. After the tumult of these past weeks, it seems too quiet here. It doesn’t feel like a holy isle although the Abbey rears to my right and the Nunnery lies in ruins to my left; its pink granite slick in the wet, its boundary wall made of wooden crosses. I tell myself that here’s a place where I have to keep my wits about me. It feels chill and inhospitable. In the guesthouse I unpack my suitcase, take off the wig, turn on the television, watch the news. I don’t expect to see myself there, not yet, but it’s only a matter of time. The interviews are done. Then the only item from the Old Country comes up: an open pit, diggers, a forensics team. Some godforsaken beach in County L—. I sit back, absorbing it all. Stunned, in fact. This is not the threat I expected to face. Abandon expectations, say the Taoists. Of course, this is not so easy. Of course I have expectations. But I’m on my guard, that old reflex, because I now know that anythin may be used against me.

  On this island, in the guesthouse run by nuns, I’m still trying to sort the sounds. The creak of a floorboard or door or window. The groan of the pipes. These are the sounds I need to know. I check the windows and floorboards and listen hard. For sure I’m worried. In the quiet of the room, I try to calm myself. I’m no longer young. I’m no longer so resilient. And I’m worried, course I am. I anticipate the shadow of the threat, the form it will take because the threat comes not only from my erstwhile enemies. At this, I permit myself a tight smile.

  Then I meet M – the woman with the notebook. I see her in the foyer of the guesthouse and recognise her from the boat. There’s a mutual recognition, something ye get with certain people in certain situations, thrown together, less random than it appears, and I feel less alone, somehow. And with my history, you have to be careful. How do ye get to know a person? The manner in which a person reveals themselves. How much to say. In my case – who to trust? She asked if I was a figment of her imagination.

  It is written, I want to say to her. The woman writing, the way we met. On the way to this place, you stepped into my story and I stepped into yours. The story was waiting, for both of us, like an ambush. The story lay in wait for us to appear.

  I return each day to the south of the island, to the Port of the Coracle and to the Port of the False Man. I wonder at the cairns – were they built by the monks as a penance, way back, or by medieval pilgrims? I get into the habit of taking two stones from the shore. I feel the weight of them in my palm. Local legend has it that if ye want to put something behind you, throw one stone into the sea. The other stone is to keep: a commitment to the future, some hope or new direction. What can I say? The great commitments of my life are as dust behind me. These days I commit to the present, to the Tao, to the Way, the flow of things. The future is uncertain. Of course it is. No matter how we shore ourselves against it. There are no guarantees and no-one gets out alive. I stand and look over the Bay, the fifty cairns at my back, but I can’t find the strength in me to throw one stone into the water or to keep one stone in my pocket. What need do I have of a stone to take back? There’s no goin back to the old flat or the old life. I feel neither here nor there. I am, for the first time since my sixteenth birthday, quite literally at sea. So much sacrificed for so little, it seems to me now. What if ye fought a war and after the peace, no-one came to comfort you? What if the peace ye fought for is nothing like what you imagined? Because each day now I wake up to find myself in another struggle, one I was engaged in all along, without full knowledge, and where is the comfort in that?

  The weather turns fine and I watch another procession arrive in the Bay. All is quiet on the island. I watch the golf cart take the luggage up to the Abbey. The pilgrims yearn for God, anyone can see. It surrounds them like a coloured light, an aura, ye could say. They’re all lit up as they step on land, ready for transformation in a holy place. Who doesn’t long for transformation? I feel this like a wound inside. Each day, I force myself out. One afternoon I see four white swans glide across the Bay. The swans are very white against the dark of the water and I wonder whose souls they are – for birds are soul-carriers, to be sure – and what are they doin here, in this place, and to what purpose? The thought pulls me up short. I will remember to tell M about these swans. I’ll remember to ask, What is it, exactly, they want me to know?

  ✳

  11

  I saw four white swans today, she tells you. They were so beautiful, they stopped me in my tracks.

  That must be lucky, you say.

  Lucky? She shrugs. I don’t know about that. Her mouth turns down. Her expression that of a person unaccustomed to luck. Or maybe a person whose luck has run out, you can’t tell.

  But maybe they’re a sign, she says.

  A sign?

  To stay here…

  You’re relieved when she says this. You’d been anxious that she might up and leave at any moment. Leaving you, and the story, adrift. Then, to disguise your relief, you tap the cover of the journal book she left for you: You had a Greek husband?

  She nods. Many moons ago. A marriage of convenience, ye could say. His need for a visa and my need for a cover. We lasted six months. But we’re friends, still. Good friends in fact. He’s married and his family is grown and I’m godmother to his daughter. He’s always said, if I’m in trouble: Go to my village. It’s always been a joke between us.

  And where is this village?

  It’s on an island, out near the Turkish coast. And he has an aunt there, Sofia – I could stay with her and he thinks I’d like it there, especially now, the age of me and all that’s happened. Especially now…

  You’re in trouble, this much I know…

  We both are, she says, flatly. And you need to confront your trouble.

  You frown at this. Who wants to confront their own trouble?

  You prefer other people’s troubles, I know. B rolls her eyes.

  You have no comeback to this and decide it’s time to change the subject. So, you say brightly, You might end up in Greece?

  She raises her chin, a little defiant, as she tends to do. Anything is possible, she says. You know that more than anyone.

  ✳

  JUST A WOMAN WHO SLIPS THROUGH

  When I get walking on the second day on this island, when the rain eventually stops, I see there are no oak trees; birds aplenty but no oak trees. My place, my little oak grove, the Saint wrote. But here on the island there was nothin to remind him of home. From the jetty, I turn left and follow the tarmac road, past the fire station and the war memorial, and then strike out across the island. The long, rough grass catches the wind and light stains the grass purple and silver and green. Small irises shine gold to the Bay at the Back of the Ocean and I climb the nearby hill. And I stand there, wind-riven, like the old Saint before me,
looking out over the Bay, and check for myself. So. It is right, just as it was written in the life of the Saint. Ye cannot see the Old Country from here. There are no oak trees and you could turn your back on the place you were from. Perhaps from the first, in my own life, it was written. As a schoolgirl, on past the checkpoints, and in the family – my aunt with the one arm – a living martyr in our own house she was – all my aunt’s stories: how the grenades blew when she moved the trunk. And later, the guns packed in the car: Armalites beneath the dog blanket, timers concealed in the back, perhaps it would’ve always went this way. Perhaps, to survive, I would’ve always went away from my home country, to some other place. And as a child weren’t we always saying goodbye to people? That’s what we were used to. Always saying goodbye. Back then we’d assemble at the place where the Saint was born. And next day, we’d gather near the stone of the Saint and walk some of the way to the port with those destined to far places – Canada, America, Australia.

  Why? I asked, when my favourite Aunt Eoife made ready to leave.

  Because, said ma, bent low and taking my child’s face in her hands. Because Empire makes it difficult to stay. But see this stone, now? I knelt down and put my hand to the surface of the stone. It was all rusty, blood-coloured. There were copper coins pressed into the stone and it was like touching a red moon, so it was, if ye could touch the moon. The stone of sorrows, my ma said. And the story ran that the Saint was one time here and had saw a man so weighted with sadness, so full of the loss, that the poor man could not go on. And the Saint blessed the man, blessed a cup of water from the nearby well and the man drank the holy water and his sorrows had went. The Saint himself left from here to exile on this island across the sea. And so, my ma said, if we leave a coin at this stone, say our goodbyes from here then no harm can befall us. The Saint is all for the exile and the emigrant, she said, if he’s for anyone. She clasped me tight to her, waved to Aunt Eoife, wiped her eyes, I knew she was tryin to stay strong, and we both walked back the way we had come.

  Under the sign of the ox, I am the person who can persevere. I have to remind myself of this. Perseverance is needed. Events pushed me round. Sometimes, to be fair, it was me what did the pushing. I consult the tarot, the Chinese horoscope, the I Ching. I pray and I meditate. Yes – ye could say, I have all bases covered.

  These days, I slip through.

  Just a woman on the cusp of days. I crack open the spine of the notebook. Take hold of the pen. Take a deep breath. Dive in. These days, I tell them I’m a writer.

  I was born in the green North under the sign of the ox.

  I roamed the Free Area when the Army roamed the streets.

  Yes, ye could say, I’ve lived my contradictions.

  I’m older now, and I long to find a place to settle, to rest; a small garden perhaps. A place near the sea. They say that as you get older, all people yearn for the sea. Back to the sea, back to the womb. To gaze at a vastness of water. To sit by the water, to find shelter from the wind. To contemplate yer own small life and to watch the horizon. To hope for some peace.

  But that’s still in the future, as M would have it. And my future is still uncertain.

  All my life I was engaged in a war. And now that particular war is done, as they say, and my thoughts turn in. And it’s another struggle now. And even though I’m worn to the bone, I believe it is possible to develop the strength of the warrior, the compassion of a healer, the wisdom of a sage, as the old Taoists have it. I’m not there yet – perhaps I never will be. But I soldier on and, like any soldier before me, I know the weapons. All those years with the weapons. Under cars; dug deep in forests; concealed in a shed. Enough. The warrior is the one who does not give up. The one who uses different weapons, in a different way. I see, as I write this, that I’m back to the perseverance. It all comes back to that, so it does. And now I seek balance, which is odd, funny, even, because ye could never of said I was a balanced person. And now that I’ve come forward, I disrupt that delicate balance; I disrupt my hard-fought quiet life. I disrupt everything.

  I try to drop any expectation that I will change, or that my life will change for the better, or that justice will be done or that X, and men like him, will be found and judged and put away for good. But, secretly, I hope for all of this.

  A mess of hopes and expectations.

  I’m a lousy Taoist. Even I can see that.

  ✳

  12

  Already, you brace yourself, because you know how people crave solidity, certainty, facts. Especially in uncertain times. And what are these if not uncertain times? And you have your own theories on this. Since the turn of the millennium, since the attack on the Towers, since the invasion of desert countries under false pretexts, since the never-ending War on Terror, people in the West prefer information, linearity, the fact of the matter. Non-fiction sells, so they tell you. Men, in general, buy non-fiction. And men, generally speaking, read other men. Studies show that women read more widely, and the gender of the writer is less important to them. It strikes you that some men actually distrust fiction – even those who profess to love it. Some equate fiction with lies. And for sure, there have been lies. Everyone’s been lied to in this new century. By politicians, by bankers, by men-in-suits. But fiction is not the same as lies, you want to protest. Fiction, to quote Arundhati Roy, gets under the skin of fact. But you know how fear of the imagination runs deep in Western culture; the fear of the made-up story; the fear of something which cannot be pinned down or held to account. A post-Enlightenment horror of what cannot be read under the microscope or subjected to the empirical gaze. There is a fear of the unknown, the mysterious and the unquantifiable. You realise it’s a fear of the child-self which drives all this: fear of the child with the sandcastle, the dressing-up box, the child who speaks to her imaginary friend. The fear of the feminine in the imagination.

  You anticipate the questions. You see yourself in a small tent off the Square at the Book Festival. The event shared with another woman and chaired by a woman. The Big Tent of course, will have a lone man, chaired by a man, with an event to himself. But that’s a whole other story. So, to get back to your event:

  Did it really happen? A man in the audience will ask.

  Did you really see that woman on the boat? Did you really meet in the guesthouse?

  A woman who looked like you?

  Did she really tell you her story?

  Did she, really?

  And then another man in the audience will put up his hand: Have you read…? Then, under the illusion of being helpful, he will offer you a reading list and a lecture on The Role of the Unreliable Narrator…

  Yes, you’ll say, after he’s spoken for a few minutes and you’ve been too polite to interrupt. After you’ve resisted the urge to roll your eyes and tap your feet. I’ve read them. All of them. And I don’t think… But…the man will not hesitate to interrupt you. He’s the expert from the floor who’s never written a thing but wants to write, feels entitled to write, and actually feels affronted by the fact that you, a woman, and a woman younger than himself, has actually been published, on more than one occasion.

  But…the man will go on…

  There is no but, you will ache to say, still resisting the urge to interrupt him in public although, obviously, he has no such qualms. And it’s your bloody event, for god’s sake. So, you’re forced to run the retort in your head, what you would like to say: There’s a big difference between this book and the novels you’re talking about. The women here are the polar opposite of the unreliable narrator. Believe me, the women in this story are the most reliable narrators you will ever come across.

  You long to say this out loud. And one day – who knows? Perhaps one day soon – you will do so. Then, just as you’re thinking this, lines from Claudia Rankine pulse through:…

  Hold up, did you

  just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did

  you just do that? Then the voice in your head

  silently tel
ls you to take your foot off your throat

  because just getting along shouldn’t be an

  ambition.

  For the time being, though, your foot is on your throat and a boot is at your neck. Getting along seems to be all you can manage. There’s a gap between what you would like to say and what you would actually say to such a man. There’s the sad reality of knowing what you would actually say in public, because anything else would rend the walls and collapse the roof and blow the tent down:

  Thank you for the reading list, you know you would say, disappointing yourself, keeping the house of words intact; trying hard, for now, to suppress the knife in your voice.

  ✳

  I KNOW WHERE THE WEAPONS ARE HID

  I stand at the end of the island pier and watch for the next ferry. Out in Martyrs’ Bay a big French cruise ship and a private helicopter circle the island. I track the helicopter, watch it dip and swoop. In my old life, a helicopter always meant trouble. My mind snares on the blades and I’m back there, years before, back where I grew up. There’s a military helicopter. The shadow of it overhead. A great dark thing; it sharks the Area. The loudspeaker: talk of curfew, talk of bein shot if you break curfew. I think of my ma and all the other mothers and the children and the people what flood the streets after 36-hours when the curfew is done. But there’s no food because the Army has went and emptied the shops. And I pick up a stone to throw at the soldiers. That’s how it begins. That’s just what ye done. We used bin lids to signal an enemy approach; left doors open so ye could slip through; changed street signs to mess with the Army patrol. We marched for better houses; jobs; the vote; an end to the harassment and the discrimination. Let me be clear, yer Honour. I never went to war, the war came to me. The man in the uniform, you got at him to get a message through to Empire. That was all there was to it. That was what war meant. That’s what us volunteers understood.