The River Capture

by Mary Costello

  ‘He did not! I didn’t know that.’

  ‘A whole gang of us went … Lord God, where have the years gone? In the early years when I was home we’d often go on some pilgrimage. We were all very pious then, everyone went to Mass and Confessions. They were social outings too, you know, a way of meeting people. All innocent fun. Later on, after your father got married, your mother drove us on our little outings. You won’t remember them, most of them were before you or Lucy were born.’

  ‘I do remember. We went to Ballinspittle to see the moving statue one summer, all of us packed into the car. I was about six. Do you remember that?’

  She stares at him, as if trying to call it up. She nods slowly.

  ‘Where was Josie then?’ he asks. ‘Did we leave her at home on her own, Ellen?’ Josie was absent from other family outings too – trips to Cork on Saturdays throughout his childhood, his mother at the wheel, his father beside her, Luke and Lucy in the back. They’d stop off at the Silver Springs Hotel on the way into the city for their lunch. One Saturday his father bought his mother a purple coat in Cash’s. It was on those trips during his teenage years that he started to buy books. All that time, Josie was home alone. Standing at the landing window for hours, waiting for the lights of the car to come up the avenue. No question of not coming back to look after her when she got sick. Maeve had protested. Why can’t your mother drive her to the hospital? Why do you have to take two months off work to do it? The good was gone by then, he and Maeve had reached their natural end and this – Maeve’s jealousy – was the final straw. Josie had put a pack of sanitary towels into the shopping trolley in SuperValu one Tuesday during the weekly shop. What d’you want them for, his mother asked. Mind your own business. On the way home she said her monthlies were back. She might have been bleeding for months, or longer, before she said anything. Afraid of his mother’s ridicule.

  Ellen has not answered him. She, too, is in a drift of thoughts.

  ‘Have you heard from the Clarks lately?’ he asks.

  ‘Nothing since Christmas.’ Hubie and Flo, once her young charges, write every Christmas with all the news. There was a time when the names of the Clark children were as familiar to him as his own sister’s. ‘They’re busy with their own lives, I suppose. Their kids are grown up now, of course. Hubie has a little grandson … How the years fly.’

  ‘They do,’ he says.

  She nods, then grows pensive.

  ‘Family is everything,’ she says quietly. ‘Blood is everything.’ Her voice is remote. Thinking of his mother, Sarah, maybe, who was not blood to her. Two strong women, once as close as sisters, growing gradually hostile towards each other over the years. From long summers spent sharing the kitchen, the initial joy of annual reunions turning to antagonism. Ellen critical of Sarah’s housekeeping and mothering skills. It’s none of your business how I rear my children. Later, after his father’s death and no one now to rein in his mother, Ellen didn’t hold back. You’re a holy show, a disgrace to this family. Words spoken that were never taken back.

  ‘There’s something I often meant to ask you,’ he says and waits for her to look at him. ‘Isn’t it strange that Dadda never covered in the well after Lucy and I were born? I often wondered why – considering how protective of us he was.’

  She frowns. ‘Is it not covered? It’s years since I was down in the yard but I thought there was a cover on it.’

  He shakes his head. ‘There’s a wooden pallet sitting on the top, that’s all. I never remember anything else covering it. When the pallet rotted he’d replace it with another pallet, and now I do the same. If Lucy ever comes home with her kids I’ll have it properly capped with concrete.’

  ‘Well, that is strange because, Lord, ye were the apples of his eye. I wonder if there was some reason. Maybe he thought it was bad luck. On account of Una.’

  She seems distracted for a few moments. ‘I think there must be underground channels running from the well down to the river. Years ago when I was young the river broke its banks and flooded the town, and Ardboe was flooded too but the water didn’t come over the land, it came up from underground, from somewhere around the house. Maybe from the well. I don’t know how it happened. There must be some underground connection.’

  He had never heard about this. The river occasionally breaks its banks but Ardboe is far enough away to avoid being flooded. He remembers the ship’s windows in the east wing. The whole place has a watery dimension.

  They sit in peaceful silence. Her presence moves him. She is like a mother to him.

  ‘Are you sleeping well these times, Luke?’ she asks. Last winter she had noticed him looking tired and he had admitted that he was sleeping poorly. The next day, she handed him a packet of melatonin tablets. ‘They’re a natural remedy, they’re not addictive.’ She had walked into town to her GP, pretended she had insomnia and got a prescription for them.

  ‘I am. I stay up too late reading, but I sleep fine. What about you?’

  ‘I don’t usually have trouble sleeping, but lately – I don’t know why – I couldn’t sleep at all last night. I suppose it’s my age. And I’m dwelling too much on the past, too, going over and over things in my head. Do you do that? … No, you’re too young to have those kinds of thoughts. Last night, for some reason, I thought of a poem I found in Hubie Clark’s bedroom years ago – when he was a teenager. It’s one thing I’ve never forgotten – it often pops into my mind … I picked it up off the floor, it was typed so I thought Hubie himself had written it for school. The man in the poem was called Henry – I always remember refined names like that. Anyway Henry was plagued by a recurring dream. In the dream he killed someone and the dream felt so real that when he woke up he was sure it was true and he really had killed someone. But then he counted everyone, and no one was missing. No one was ever missing.’

  For a few moments there is, on her face, a look of bafflement. What is it she is thinking?

  ‘What else kept you awake last night?’ he asks. ‘What else were you thinking about?’

  ‘About how different everything is, how there’s only you and me left now. I doubt Lucy will ever come back to live here. I never expected to be on my own all my life. I was thinking last night about Josie too, and Una and Dadda’s sudden death. All of that.’ She looks at him. ‘I have this thought sometimes, this notion … that maybe I took a wrong turn somewhere along the way – or maybe the family took a wrong turn in the past. When I think of the fine family that we were, and all those who went before us and the big estate my mother came from. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, went to a private school in France when she was a young woman! Imagine that! She could speak fluent French and play the piano. Did you know that, Luke? That’s the kind of lineage we have! My mother could play the piano. Of course it was a big come-down for her marrying my father. Maybe that was the wrong turning.’

  And Dadda’s marriage, another come-down, she probably thinks, though she doesn’t say it.

  ‘Losing Una was terrible,’ he says, ‘and then your father, but lots of families have tragedies, Ellen, and some a lot worse than that. It doesn’t have to be caused by a wrong turn.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘And you shouldn’t be hard on yourself either. Jesus, Ellen – you’ve spent your whole life helping others. Sending money home to your mother in the early years, coming home every summer to help out with the work. And helping Dadda too. Remember when he got that big arrears bill from Revenue and you bailed him out? Remember? And he sowed a field of potatoes in your honour to thank you!’

  Managing money, never one of Dadda’s gifts. Nor his, either.

  ‘I know. I was always trying to do the best for everyone. In America years ago I’d be awake at night worrying about things – Mamma’s blood pressure or Josie’s epilepsy or how they were going to make ends meet if the price of milk or beet fell. I was always a worrier. You can grow demented thinking about things, I know that. And last night for some reason I started going back in t
ime, trying to put my finger on the exact moment that things started to go wrong. You know the way they say a person often comes to a fork in the road and they have to decide? Well, maybe I should never have gone to America. Or – and don’t laugh at this, Luke – when I was a girl I thought I had a religious vocation and I pushed it away. I might have been a reverend mother!’ She lets out a fine hearty laugh and he laughs with her.

  ‘Sister Ellen,’ he says, smiling.

  Suddenly he remembers Joyce’s governess … Dante whatshername in Bray. As a little boy he sat at her feet as she recited poetry. She wanted to be a nun too, but she got taken in by a bank clerk from the Bank of Ireland and married him, and then he made off with her fortune. Abandoned bride. Conway her name was. Conman Conway. Women can be awful gullible.

  ‘Anyway, who knows,’ Ellen says. ‘But last night I kept going back … back to Dadda’s death and Josie’s muteness, back to New Year’s Day in 1941. That was the day that changed everything for this family. We never really talked about it. But I remember it well.’

  All the memories she has that he knows nothing about. How we can be so close and yet.

  ‘Tell me,’ he says. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘It was one of those cold winter mornings, frost on the windowpanes. I remember coming down into the warm steamy kitchen, my father at the table, Josie laughing – her little baby laugh. The kettle boiling and the tea poured and none of us realising how close we were to the calamity … But the clock was ticking. I re-live it so often in my mind – Dadda rising from his chair, reaching for his hat … heading towards the disaster that was less than half an hour away. And all I wanted was to get up to Lynch’s as fast as I could to show off the new coat to Alice.’

  She looks at Luke, shakes her head.

  ‘When I got home they were bringing her up out of the well. They had tied a rope around Dadda’s waist and he went down and brought her up and handed her to the men … limp. And do you know the worst of it, Luke? Do you know what my first thought was? I thought wasn’t it a good job I wore the new coat up to Lynch’s because look at the blood and muck on that one. Now I’d have the new one all to myself …’ She pauses. ‘I often think – suppose it was Una, and not me, who had skived off up to Lynch’s that morning in the new coat? Suppose it was me and not Una who went out to do the chores – gathering the eggs, bringing in the turf? That’s what I was imagining last night … Me crossing the yard that morning after collecting the eggs, me heading toward the house but stopping at the well, leaning over the wall, looking in. And Josie with me, lagging behind, playing with the cat maybe … And supposing the well was destined to claim a child that day – any child. No matter what, it was preordained. I began to rewind everything that happened that morning, like when they run a film backwards and I brought Una up out of the well, and mended her bones and walked her back across the yard to the henhouse and the turf-shed, and back up into the house, and there I was – the other me, sitting at the table. And I swapped places and steered that me towards the back door and out across the yard to the life about to be snuffed out.’

  He can see it all. The yard, the well, the little girl. He wants to say no, nothing was preordained, but the words won’t come.

  ‘Lying in bed last night,’ she says, ‘it came to me: Una was the lucky one. To have died young, without blemish. Dispatched straight to Heaven with the pure heart of a child, to have suffered only broken bones, a broken body. To be spared the struggles of growing up and growing old, spared all that heartache. Isn’t it true, Luke? And do you know what else I thought? I thought that in another moral universe, I might hold Una accountable for all we have suffered. Accountable for Dadda’s death too and all that came after, and for the breach in Josie – for the way her brain was affected and her life changed for ever …’

  He is walking home in the late evening. Sing, Josie would say, as they crested the Vee on the journey home. The nausea would still be hours or even days away. They were back in their own county, the sun low, the valley opening out before them. Below, in the distance, the road and the winding river will lead them home. He’d think of the chemicals coursing through her veins, the poison infusing her cells. Then he’d clear his throat and throw her a smile, and she, she, would sit up straight, her head held high, proud to be the one giving the orders, and being obeyed. Drumming his hand on the steering wheel he’d begin to hum the intro. After a few bars he’d break into song and she would follow suit. I have climbed highest mountains, I have run through the fields.

  He can feel the river’s presence on his right. It never leaves him; it is there, always, on the edge of his consciousness. Even in sleep, it flows through his dreams, watching, waiting, coaxing his attention. He stands and gazes at the water. The tide is coming up, gently, barely perceptible. Twelve miles from the sea and still tidal, every drop still governable by the moon. And inside every drop, millions of atoms in perpetual motion. No, trillions. He calculated the figure one night when he was a teenager. He had to compute the molar mass of water first and then use Avogrado’s Number to get the number of molecules. And then he must have followed some other formula to arrive at the number of atoms. Deep into the machinery of number, he used to feel enlarged, exhilarated, feel himself and the world cohere. He’s forgotten it all now … Sextillions it was, not trillions. Sextillions of atoms inside every drop of water and inside each atom, a riot of commotion and collision. And all the atoms in all the drops in all the oceans and seas and rivers and lakes, in streams and ponds and puddles, in tanks and pipes and taps, in kettles, bottles, glasses, beakers, tin cans … the constant motion, the perpetual striving of water. Towards what?

  He walks on. Any minute now, the tide will turn at the Inch and begin its outward journey. He would like to arrest time at that moment of turning, witness the instant the change occurs and the current swirls and turns and begins to slide back towards the sea. He tilts his head to listen closely. The turn of the tide must be discernible to certain creatures, the low liquid decibels audible to the ears of dippers, maybe, and otters and swans. A sound discernible to trees and plants too. The kind of thing Josie might have heard.

  He turns and looks downriver. In the dusk the river melds with the bank and the woodlands. He can make out the old chicken factory in the distance. A time will come when it will be a roofless edifice, with jackdaws flying in under steel girders, the ground littered with puny bones and old manure, a feather floating in the air.

  He walks on. He thinks about the girl. Ruth. He lets the name form in his mind. What is it he feels? A gathering of desire, a great urge to see her. To see her naked, to be inside her. He has been celibate for two years, since he and Deirdre Kelly from the council estate outside the town comforted each other for a few weeks, each in the aftermath of their mothers’ deaths.

  He really should move back to Dublin. Dublin. In the magical chaos after Josie’s death he had returned to his job in Belvedere. Then slowly, over a year, he began to suffer a progressive erosion of the spirit, a steady depletion of reserves. Without Maeve he lost the run of himself and the city became a place of freedom and temptation and excess. He drank copiously, spent with abandon, sated old appetites. New desires too. On a staff night out, in the dark corner of a nightclub, the young, newly appointed maths teacher, Oisín Kelly, with his fair to reddish hair and delicate cheekbones and tired misty eyes, put a hand on Luke’s arm and looked steadily into his eyes. In the late-night heady mix of dim lights and music and alcohol, he thought Oisín beautiful. Oisín smiled and leaned in and kissed him on the mouth and he kissed him back, and then panicked.

  ‘I’m not gay,’ he said.

  Oisín smiled and shrugged. ‘So?’

  ‘That’s the truth! I swear! If I was gay I’d have been out at fifteen.’

  Jesus Christ, he thought, what am I? Half gay?

  It was true: if he were gay he would have been out at fifteen. He would not have cared. He is his father’s son – tell the truth at all costs, regardle
ss of convention.

  He looked at Oisín, at one of his eyes, then the other, at the smiling mouth, and he kissed him again. Desire rising in the tongue and the mouth, lust in the groin; physical love bred out of spirit and intellect and beauty. Walking in the small hours through empty streets to Oisín’s place, the bawdy talk, the wicked laughter. His hand on a man’s cock. Jesus, to hold a cock that wasn’t his own. The tender touch of Oisín’s hand, his lips, the tawny hair on his arms in the dawn light. And then the walk home alone in daylight and the shock, the sickly realisation, of what he had done.

  But the next day he returned to Oisín and to days and nights of pure joy and laughter and ecstasy, moments of love and of feeling newly born. Followed by hours of self-loathing, fear, doubt, panic at being spotted entering a gay bar. He began to admire men’s bodies, their bare arms, square shoulders, round tight arses. He began to dress differently, take care of his skin. Mother of God. When he was with Oisín it wasn’t tawdry, but natural. Just sitting together meant something. It was more than sex. He didn’t know how to describe it.

  Why do we have to be one thing or the other? he thinks. Why do we have to be anything? Does it matter who we kiss, who fills us with longing? Does it matter who puts what where? The thing he had not foreseen, not expected, was the purity of feeling, the integrity of feeling he had for men. Way beyond the physical, beyond mere possession. To do with the ease and affinity between men, the protectiveness, the feeling that he could say anything and do anything and nothing had to be explained.

  One of the first signs of the end of the world, he read once: when men marry men. For a few years it was where the heat was: inside a man, at the source, the nub, the core. The need to touch and be touched there. He has always loved human touch, human skin, human smells. In the nine months he was with Oisín he oscillated between moments of searing shame and fear and uncertainty, and the thrill of new adventure, the feeling of opening doors, flinging up windows. Extreme feeling this, living from the heart of the sensorium. He read widely about sexuality, mulled over his own, acted out his craven fantasies. Alone, he contemplated the feminine in himself and, stirred by desire at the thought of being part woman, he massaged his nipples, ran a finger along his scrotal scar, the vestigial seam of a foetal vagina before its folds fused and his pre-natal self became male. Baculum, baubellum. He imagined his own labia, a tight cervix, his unborn womb an ocean of fecundity. He detected a sensitive and feminine element in himself, and suspected that, at certain times of the month, he still possessed traces of a rudimentary menstrual cycle that, prone to the pull of celestial bodies, affected his entire organism.