I made it out from that blackened room. The cat did too. All of us made it out from the burning house . . . in a physical way, anyhow. The crow was waiting for us all on that middle-of-the-night street.
I was the only one who could see him. The only time I ever made him disappear was when I drank. It did not make him silent, though; alcohol never took away his voice. I am the only one who has ever heard it. I could pick out his tone from a murder of millions.
He has come into every bedroom in every house I have moved to since.
There is untold darkness to the world that we have been given, and after many years of battling against that darkness I have learned to be still in its presence. To lay a place for it at the table, to sit with its black feather-tips, to let its echoes dance across the landscape of my insides when the sadness comes, silent like a fox.
•
When I was nine and my wee brother was seven he carried a water rat home inside a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bum-bag. He had been playing at the stream beside our house when his plastic killer whale from London Zoo was carried away by careless water rushing over slimy stones. The sun had started to creep behind old trees and new council houses, and his friends made their way home with grubby hands and freckling faces. But he didn’t join them up the concrete steps back to our house.
Teatime came and the smell of stew filled our yellow kitchen. I laid three bowls on our wooden table, trying to cover up the bit where we’d carved our initials using the spare back-door key. When he still hadn’t come back, Mum went to ‘do the rounds’. He could have been with the Gillespie boys playing Nintendo, ‘fishing’ with wee Craig, or climbing the big ivy wall behind Tommy’s shop. He’d be safe, anyway – because that’s how things were back then on our housing estate – togetherness in the face of hardship. Way back then, before the activities of our Protestant council estate reached their lowest point, folk were good to each other. They looked out for each other. There was more that kept us together back then than the things that later crept in to cleave us apart.
When she returned, an hour later – sheet-white and shaken – she found us stroking a beautiful, warm water rat in the downstairs toilet. Three Fridays later, at dusk, a mangled, close-to-dying urban fox followed us from the top of the housing estate, where the main road grew out of the scrub boundary of the football field, right onto our back doorstep. I wonder, these days, if those creatures could smell the loss of our father off our young, mucky skin. I wonder if they could see what was held in store for us, just a wee bit in the future. I wonder if that cat could see it, too. I still remember how calm the rat was that night, as my brother held it delicately in his little boy hands.
•
The coal-black crow that came into my path that September night has yet to leave my side. Some days he is like the midnight ebony edges around a blue moon, soft and carrying only a whisper of violence in his beak. But some days he is huge and folkloric, carrying unthinkable grief on the tips of his wings as he crouches over me, hiding the light away like an eclipse.
The echoes of the Troubles in Ireland have been, are being and will continue to be a coal-black crow that covers us with its wings. In those moments between waking and sleeping, while the border between reality and nightmare dances, the past, if it has not been dealt with, will keep resurfacing. It is my belief, though, that we are learning to talk to that crow, these days. We are learning to talk with each other, too. How do we talk about things which are so real they are almost unbelievable? I spent decades trying to accept my own story, trying to make peace with the sorrow and the unending, haunting grief.
The smell of young flesh beginning to burn, just singed enough to register in the brain. The way a cheap door warps – as a pink room fills with thick black smoke – and the ripples in the wood look like the sea, like the sea on a violent, volatile night. The way that a smooth face bleeds in a way so different from a weathered, split knee. How a mangy stray cat, when called upon for action, can be as loyal as any dog. How, when your house has been set alight, you really do abandon everything – arrow-swift, nightmare-shook, carrying less than nothing in your blackening hands.
How do we talk about these things?
Ebony-black feathers, glistening at the end of a little-girl bed like oil spilled on a wet road? A man-sized crow that arrived on the day the world changed shape, and never really went away, no matter how many times you told him he wasn’t real.
The experiences I had in that childhood home, in the Waterside of Derry, less than a mile from where I now live, burrowed down deep, like a cough that has settled. They left their shards here and there, underneath the surface and right down into the bone and the marrow.
There are places that are both hollowed and hallowed all in one. They have wounded us, but we must return to them if we want to try to loose their tight hold on us. The places watch as we lose our way, as we are sent away, as we run away; they wait in stillness for us to find our way back.
CHAPTER FOUR
Snow Light
THE WINTER OF THE YEAR I started secondary school, the snow came to Derry, blown in from Russia, but another important visitor arrived just before the snow. Bill Clinton – then President of the United States of America – addressed the biggest crowd I have ever seen in Derry’s Guildhall Square. I didn’t know anything about him at all, except that that morning my mum and her best friend had served him his breakfast in the hotel where they both worked. He stood tall in front of the bright Christmas lights, and as soon as he began to talk I could feel something inside me shift and change shape. He spoke of peace, in language I had never heard before. He talked about divisions between people, and about the difference between people who want to make peace and those who want to prevent it, who want to remain caught up in the terrifying chaos of our ‘normal’ lives in the North of Ireland.
As a child of a mixed-religion family which had only just been broken up – largely due to the violence in our bombed-out, bruised and broken city – listening to the conviction in that man’s voice as he beckoned all of us in front of him on a journey towards a future built on peace, I knew that something had changed in me. I wasn’t even a teenager yet but I knew that I wanted things to be different – so different – from how they were.
A metamorphosis began as I stood there shivering in the freezing Derry air. Clinton ended his speech by quoting Seamus Heaney. This was the first time I had ever heard the great poet’s words, and the ones the president chose that day are still the words that I have been most moved by in all my life:
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
More than two decades have passed since Clinton’s speech, and Ireland has experienced such deep-rooted change in the years between. Voices, once silenced, now echo loudly. Since the Brexit vote, the Irish border has been on more people’s minds than ever imagined possible before.
I lived away from my island for most of my adult years – witnessing its transition from a place far away – my view foggy and obscure. I have been ‘home’ for three years now and I finally feel that I can see past the fog. I spent lots of time exploring the lands of Scotland, Wales and England in my twenties, places that have changed me and allowed the process of healing to begin. But my draw to place, into the wild and unknown parts of the landscape around me, the pull that dragged me in close, started here in Ireland. It started in the North, right here where the border of the island weaves its path.
Derry was a dark city to be in and I was scared. My baby brother was scared. Our mum must have been terrified, although we didn’t know it back then. During the worst moments, we were taken across the border – away from all that was burning and bleeding around us – into the heart of rural Donegal. We would be collected straight from school, in a car we could not afford to tax or insure, and cross a hard border manned by British soldiers. I see us both so clearly in the backseat, cr
ouched down. The only way we could tell that Mum was scared was because she didn’t turn the radio back on after we made it across the border; we couldn’t see her shaky hands, or into her tired single-mum face from our in-between space behind her.
That temperamental red Volvo allowed our mum to take her children as far away as she could with whatever spare fuel money she had from working long, hard shifts in the hotel. She took us from beach to cove, over bog-land to woods, alongside streams into fields – allowing the invisible line of the border to act as some unseen, mythical protector. We were delivered across it through grace that felt sent from a place unknown – fabled, and with an urgent sense of secrecy. Many of the places we spent time in, I realised later, were places where the veil was gossamer thin, if it was even there at all. We spent days upon days in places bathed in deep and indefinable energy. We walked in two worlds, in a way – woven together, knitted so loosely, with such delicacy, that separation faded, even if only for a moment.
Childhood is already a place with its own energy and reckoning; memories and their recollection are, too. We remember the exact same thing so differently from one another; the past is a place of metamorphosis, a dance between us and things unseen, ever shifting. When we try to piece all the parts back together to make the whole, we are left slipping through the wet, changing sands. Like memory, and like childhood, thin places are experienced by each of us in entirely different ways. You bring your own self to the table, and your relationship to that self; place is there to hold us and to let the echo bounce back in those exquisite, ethereal encounters. Certainly they have the potential to exist everywhere, in every country, but the power of place is felt very strongly in Ireland and Britain, and the places people most commonly describe as feeling thin are sacred and spiritual sites such as stone circles, cashels, burial sites, holy wells, blessed rivers and ancient ruins. Many of the places in which I have felt a sense of quiet, otherworldly awe have been such places as these.
In my thirties I have done much looking back; I have allowed memories to flood over me like a winter sunrise. And I have been reminded, over and over, of places where no stones lie, no bodies are held, no bones are sealed, no water is revered – soft, elusive places, found in the least likely of locations. One of the thinnest places I have ever been was at the periphery of a field, at the top of a laneway, looking down onto a rough, sectarian housing estate – the second of my childhood – on the edges of Derry.
Long before I was born, every single street on our new housing estate had at least one cherry blossom tree planted at the end of it. We had been staying with some friends after the petrol bomb, and one day – just after school – Mum and my stepdad went out to view the new house the council had offered us. They arrived back at teatime, as the early autumn light was streaming into the front room, peach-pale and shimmering. One of the first things my mum said was that there were cherry blossom trees. The only thing we had had in the small front garden of our last house – the one we were bombed out of – was a cherry blossom tree. There wasn’t really any need for our mum to say anything more. We definitely couldn’t keep sleeping on the floor of her colleague’s house, which had already been too full before we’d all shown up in the dead of one September night, coughing like sailors and shaken through, ghosts of ourselves.
We moved into the new house in the same month as we’d moved out of the old one. We moved in, at first, with only the clothes we stood in and the handful of things we’d been able to rescue from the old house. We had nothing at all, at the beginning, except the bare essentials.
This new house was on the other side of the River Foyle, on an equally sectarian housing estate, except this one was a Catholic housing estate. As soon as anything sectarian happened to a family or individual, they were moved into a similar type of house, but in the opposite type of area. I suppose it was the only thing the people working in the Housing Executive Office could think to do really, to try to make sure it didn’t happen again. It’s still what they do, even now. Areas in Derry that are supposed to be ‘mixed’ still often have a way of finding their chosen side. This new estate was very similar to the last one, as housing estates often seem to be. Small patches of green dotted around – not enough to play or plant on – communal concrete squares, too many humans in one small area, the insistent squealing of electricity meters running on empty.
The thing which made this one stand out from the last one was the fact that this estate was built on the hill Amelia Earhart had crashed her plane into, in May 1932. Our new house was at the very top of that hill – right where the new estate ended and gave the land back to itself – overlooking the River Foyle and the fated city it flows through. I think back so often now on the many different views I had of that river – at all her stages, with all her bridges and mouths, all her thin, hidden places. Every house I lived in was within sight of the River Foyle, even though I lived on opposite sides of it, and eventually moved miles outside of Derry, right where the river becomes a salty, reed-fringed estuary. A body of water knows no definite form, no true boundaries, no borders. She is held delicately in the in-between place, carrying us in her strong flow to spaces unknown, unmapped territories.
When Amelia Earhart began to ready herself to crash-land in a place she had never before set eyes on, above green hills and sprawling farmland, one of the last things she would have seen in the underworld beneath her plane was that meandering River Foyle. Blue and steady, hungry and steeped in myth. She would, most likely, have known very little about the city where she was about to land. The border she had flown above had been in place for just over a decade. From her bird’s-eye view, she would have been completely unaware of there even being a border at any point in that unmarked world below her. She would have been unaware of there being lines on the surface of the landscape – veins through which a thing not dissimilar to blood could be channelled, leaving no trace. Of there being invisible cracks beneath the surface that broke the land up and spat it back out. Amelia Earhart could not see the debris that already littered that wild and ancient city of oaks – shrapnel that was so small it seemed it could never really be taken out from under the skin. Amelia Earhart could not see the broken parts of the city and its people – nor the sorrow and trauma that would eventually leak into the belly of the land – lying quietly below her.
The border that Earhart had flown across at least once before she crash-landed in a field in Derry-Doire-Londonderry was utterly invisible. If she were able somehow to return to that same field now, a century later, she would still see no sign whatsoever of any physical boundary below her feet. Her eyes – sharp and inquisitive though they were – would search and search for the markers between the North and the South, between there and here, to no avail. There is no trace of a dividing line in those fields to which we moved after being petrol bombed out of our home on the opposite bank of the River Foyle. That border – the one that has been being debated and contested for the entirety of the Brexit debate of the last years – the one that lives have been lost over, is a thing Amelia Earhart could never have held in her eager explorer hands. No matter how hard any of us may try to grasp at it – to define its outline and draw its skeleton, to mark its place on the land’s skin like a shadow stitched on with rope – it slips away from us like the first butterfly of the summer, too otherworldly to feel real and not dissimilar, I realise now, to any thin place on earth.
That Christmas sneachta – the snow – came to Earhart Park. It was the only Christmas we would spend there on the city-side of the River Foyle; we stayed for less than a year. We were just as unwelcome on both sides of that river, and were bullied out before we’d even properly unpacked. It was the only Christmas Day of my life until then that had ever brought snow. It still is.
The fields beyond the top lane led us, without any marker, to the place where Derry became Donegal, and the idea of places shape-shifting became a central and haunting one for me that winter. The lessons that winter carried in its icy breath have
stayed with me for my whole life. There is something, too, about snow that weaves reality in alongside something else. The land is not the same land it was before the snow fell, somehow. It casts a spell – rather, we cast some kind of spell – over the day. There is a sense of something unknown, a sense of white-cloaked wonder. I looked up the word sneachta recently, and the dictionary listed three ways to use it in a sentence: ‘driven snow’, ‘the snows of yester-year’, but – most intriguingly for me – was the final entry: ‘nothing would surprise me more’. The Irish language itself has imbued snow with something that comes at you all out of nowhere, something which creeps up behind you and takes the wind right out of your sails. We cannot really know what is held within snow’s ethereal whiteness. What was once there before may now be gone. Where lines once were, now there might only be an eternal void of nothingness.
This new housing estate was surrounded by Irish Traveller stopping grounds. There were horses roaming the fields. Huge fires were lit in their fields most evenings, and they were so different from the fires the other folk we lived alongside lit. The fires the Travellers lit were for warmth, not destruction like the sectarian bonfires that were built like wooden towers on both sides of the river. The Travellers’ fires were for gathering around and for something else I couldn’t quite name back then. I think I understand their fires a little better now.
I encountered, for the first time that winter, folk that refused to be easily named or kept in one place – living here and there, always on the move, only ever found temporarily in those liminal, unmapped places. I met – accidentally, awkwardly – people who, like us, were a wee bit unwanted in the places where they had turned up. A wee bit too different from the people over on the estate to be ever fully welcomed. But the thing that intrigued me most of all was the fact that those people were more than fine when the time came for them to move along. In fact, maybe they even craved it. Their roots, it seemed, were long enough to make any place feel like home, no matter how stony the ground.
Thin Places Page 7