That night our friend had walked me up home from the village chip shop, and we chatted about life on the short, dark walk. He made me laugh, so very much; it took me years to find people that made me laugh the way he had. My mum was working nights back then, so I went to sleep, and he headed back down to join the rest of our friends – the ones who could easily sneak into the two local pubs, even if they weren’t the right age. Afterwards, as normal, they would all stand outside the chippy for another wee while, messing with each other in the cold, finding joy in places that not everyone might think to look.
That next day, a Sunday at the end of April 1999, my gorgeous, kind, funny friend’s clothes were found by a policeman – his cousin – in a wee clearing beside his house where we would all often hang out at night. My friend, that blond-haired, joyful, cheeky young man, the funniest person I had ever met, was found miles up the hill, in ancient woods.
Rather, his body was found. The bloodied, battered, utterly broken shell of a body that was found – in a shallow grave, in Loughermore Forest – was not my friend. My friend is still that beautiful person who treated us all as if we were worthy of deep joy, and laughter. I need for that abused body to be in no real way linked with my friend. I need to know that the only people for whom that body has any relevance are the people who put my gentle, calm friend through what they did, just fifteen hours before his body was unearthed. One person was charged back then, despite all of our village and the army camp inside it being interviewed and monitored for months upon months. The man who served time was a neighbour of my friend, of us all, and he was charged with disposing of the body. He never shared the details that we begged for, never admitted who murdered our friend, his neighbour. It broke our village apart. It took everything we thought was real life and turned it into a warped inversion of itself. I don’t know if I will ever be able to find the words to describe the horror of that time. I have tried to, on almost every anniversary, and try as I may, it never feels real. The words are shadows of themselves; they make a ghost of a boy who was far, far from that. My closest female friend from that time – from that group – said this year that she remembers the darkness, that everything remained dark for quite some time. I don’t remember that part; I guess I was maybe a bit more used to an absence of light. If I’m honest, which it has taken me such a long time to be, I remember knowing that my childhood had absolutely and definitely ended then. We never skinny-dipped again in the waterfall up the hill; we never dared each other to kiss behind the chapel on the way to Glack; we stopped walking the back lanes holding hands and talking about where we would all live (next door to one another on the two old estates on the Shore Road, beside the horses and the oaks); we all, every single one of us young ones, lost something we could never dream of clawing back.
In relation to what our friend’s family had lost, our pain paled in comparison. But I see now, twenty years on, that our loss was still a vast one. Hardly any of us kept in touch. Many of us suffered depression; many of us still do. Some of us who said we’d stay, left, and it is looking like we may have left for ever. Some of us who wanted to leave – to live a life very different from that in a wee sleepy village – stayed, and married our next-door neighbour, and bought houses next door to our own parents. It broke something in us, that murder of one of the best people we knew. It broke something in me so huge that it has taken two decades to try to fix it, to forgive the world for taking such a beautiful thing and beating it back down into the soil. To forgive humanity for allowing the neighbour of someone I loved to carry his broken body in a car – up to an ancient forest that I loved – and to bury him, without ever explaining what happened, who did it, or why. It has taken me twenty years to try to accept that that same person apparently played golf a handful of hours later, as people he had grown up with, was related to, shared a life with, searched through fields, laneways and hidden places to find the body that he had buried. It has taken me twenty years to accept, and to let go of, the guilt that I felt when I used to think – for a fleeting moment – how I had already experienced enough loss before that Sunday. That I had been given too much from the pot, and I could take no more sorrow – especially not something that heavy, that unbearably black. I spent years trying to play it down; I was so terrified of making his murder about me. It wasn’t about me – I wasn’t his poor mamma, his lovely sister, his da or his wee brother, who was left to be his grieving mam’s only son. I’d known my friend for far fewer years than our other friends, and we weren’t related either.
Now I see that we may all experience the same loss, in a way, but our backgrounds, our home lives, our experiences, differ so greatly, that we will naturally all feel the ripples so differently, so individually. What I experienced when I lost my friend was so intrinsically linked with my own ideas about home, belonging and safety. How could it not be? I associated every single thing about Ballykelly, from then on, with the loss of him. It’s what I had done with all of the places I’d already had to leave: making things black and white – good and bad, safe and dangerous – made it easier to cut all ties. Slowly I watched, as if from the sidelines, as I built a picture once more in my head and told myself it was okay to leave there, just as I’d left everywhere else. It was a place of unrivalled suffering, and nothing could ever turn it back into an almost safe place; nothing could bring back the sense of calm and belonging I had once felt there.
When my mum and her new partner sold the house that same year and moved to Edinburgh with his job, I did the thing I knew made it all easier to cope with. I walked away from Ballykelly, and every single thing it represented, and pretended I had never even set foot in the place. Nothing was the same after that year, the year we all entered the next millennium. Fear held me tightly in the belly of its storm, and my identity, which had once seemed so fiercely outlined as a teenager, had faded at the edge; the lines of my map had blurred and I didn’t have a compass.
Grief is a country that has no definite borderlines and that recognises no single trajectory. It is a space that did not exist before your loss, and that will never disappear from your map, no matter how hard you rub at the charcoal lines. You are changed utterly, and your personal geography becomes yours and yours only.
•
When my friend died, I internalised lots of the trauma instead of processing it properly, likely because this was the norm for me; it was simply another layer added onto the pile. For months after he died I was repeatedly taken out of school and questioned by the police; most of us were. Instead of trying to process – at the tender age of sixteen – the loss of one of the kindest, gentlest people I have ever been loved by, I ran. I ran from the place he had inhabited with such brightness. For two full years, he came to me in my dreams as a white bird. Sometimes, but not always, an egret, like the ones we’d all watched together at the Shore Road – not always visible in the dream, either, always white though, always a white bird.
When the dreams stopped, a handful of years passed in various different houses on the island of Ireland – with my grandparents first, then in any room in any flat in Dublin for as long as I could afford the rent. I was living in a cramped, damp bedsit in the Northside of the city – a place where I’d had to board the window up with wood after a drug addict had broken the glass with an axe – when I was told I had been growing cells on the inside of me. I was told that I’d been growing them for a number of years, likely: cells that needed to be cut out. Cells on my cervix that needed cut out sharply, swiftly.
I’ve spent so much of this last year thinking – really thinking – about trauma, and the ways it might affect our bodies. The female friend I lost this year was the closest female friend I’ve ever had. She was a girl, and then a woman, so full of anger, jealousy and confusion due to an exceptionally difficult childhood. Hers had been a very different childhood from mine. She came from a wealthy, large, close family, but she had lost her mother at a very young age, and the loss affected her so differently from the way my loss affecte
d me. There was addiction – similar to what I would later experience – but there was also aggression, lying and violence; there was undeserved abuse towards those of us who showed her the very most love. The year we turned eighteen she tried to drive us both over the large concrete bridge that spanned the freezing black River Foyle because a guy she fancied had asked me if I was feeling any better. It was the first time I’d left the house since adult chick-enpox had made me miss all my exams and every single party that followed. A handful of weeks later she stole another friend’s phone and sent the same guy a message signed as our friend telling him that she had taken her own life because of him. The friend with the stolen phone and I had to tell him she was alive, and that none of it was even nearly true. The following year she would go on to steal my clothes and wear them in front of a guy I was seeing, noting how big they were for her. She would tie her partner up and attack him, report him to the police and try to have him deported, call his mother to say he was in prison when he wasn’t, leave uni, fake her exam results and become involved with a gang of South American drug dealers. The years after this were equally as fraught and, after one final attempt to get together with my boyfriend, she dropped off the radar and I heard from her next from a convent, where she was drying out and learning to be a nun. When I broke up with my partner in Cork she rang from Spain to say she was coming to see me – she wanted to make amends. I waited and waited but she never came. Facebook showed her at party after party in South America, where she’d chosen to fly instead. When she died we were in the midst of our longest period without speaking.
I have no real knowledge of human psychology but I do know that a point comes in your life – I hope in everyone’s life – when you finally accept that no one, no matter what they themselves may have suffered, should be allowed to add to your suffering. When she died, that friend I loved so dearly and had been hurt by so deeply, I struggled to understand how I was supposed to grieve for her. At her funeral, on Easter Sunday, buzzards and crows filled a perfect blue sky with movement. Butterflies and bees spread their promise of hope all around, and I could feel things shift inside me. Things that had been stuck for a very long time, for more than three decades; things that had less than nothing to do with that April day, and everything to do with it all in one. And so I did what I knew I needed, what I knew was the only way to get through. I went to the only thin place I had been to with her – a long, bright beach in the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking part of south-west Donegal.
That night, as the moon threw its light down on a sheltered, quiet harbour, inside my van, at the point where the body gives itself over into the soothing hands of sleep, I dreamed of the friend I had lost as a teenager in Ballykelly. I dreamed that gentle, kind friend I lost back then had turned into a beautiful, solitary white bird again. He was in the corner of a vast concrete warehouse, full of exceptionally violent men. He was not cowering, nor was he even in the slightest bit scared, despite the terror and the blood that was making its way onto the rough slate-grey of the dream’s incarcerating walls. He was not the eighteen-year-old he had been when I last saw him. He was, instead, a little egret, serene, fearless, at one in his own white and feathered skin. I knew that he knew I was there and that we did not need to exchange any words. All the years that had passed between us since his brutal, devastating murder were not dark, then. They shone, like a celestial and brilliant light, a mirrored constellation.
The losses came in different decades from one another – they were in different lifetimes – but they wove themselves together with golden thread. Suddenly, each felt a little lighter. There was, for the very first time, a stillness inside me when I thought of them; I realised that when I closed my eyes and thought of them they were both laughing again.
It was only this summer when I began, for the first time, to talk to those closest to me about those two people I have lost. I’ve long struggled with honesty and intimacy in relationships of all sorts – perhaps friendship has been the hardest of all to navigate – and it felt like a laying out on the gravel of all my failings, my baggage, my loss. A way of saying: I will try to push you away. I will not tell you when I am hurt, when I need you. I am not like you; our friendship can never be easy. A way of saying: I have lost so much; only stay if you are really going to stay. No longer drinking has removed many of the platforms and ways to meet new friends, too, so I guess maybe I have recognised that I have to work, really work, if I want to find good people for my life.
This year I have realised that I am finding people who stay. They are coming into my path, they are seeing the sorrow, they are listening to the ache, and they are staying. They are not the kind of people that I need to try to fix. They are not people who ring me in the early hours before dawn to tell me they are going to kill themselves and then go silent for weeks afterwards. Neither are they the kind of people who criticise, ridicule, hurt, isolate, blame or abuse me. I have spent much of my life, until recently, accepting deep and disturbing abuse from the people closest to me. Recently I’ve been trying to unpick it, to find an order or a meaning to it all. The explanation was fairly simple, and so easy to understand. All it took was for me to admit to the certain aspects of my experience I’d been hiding from for decades. When you love people who have been through horrific times and experienced significant trauma, the balance between you can become undone. You may be made to feel – either by the person, or by your own self – that you are responsible. That you may even be to blame for their suffering. That you are not good enough. That you are not enough. That your existence is lacking in worth. These messages may be explicit – screamed at you, told to others in your life repeatedly, written in drunken emails or texts – or they may take a more covert shape, so hidden that others around you struggle to see them. You may be the only person in the whole world who your abuser treats the way they do, making it very hard to relate to others around you who do not know the other sides to them. Either way, sharing a life with people whom you love but who will not seek help for the anger that turns into abuse and is hurled at you, may leave you, first, feeling numb. Then, sooner or later, something might change inside you and you cannot and will not take it any longer. You might realise that you have changed, that you have begun to think that maybe things are not, in fact, down to you. You might see that your loved one’s anger, jealousy or insecurity is not your fault. You might begin to think that maybe the treatment you have been accepting is not okay, is not right, no matter how fully you may love the person delivering it. There are many forms of abuse, and I know a handful of them. I know that if you have known abuse for a prolonged period, there may be a serious fear in you that it will never stop, and that everyone you encounter will treat you the same way: as though you have absolutely no worth. Breaking out and away is terrifying but no one – no one at all – deserves a life in which they cannot see themselves as a thing worth saving.
These days, the circle of people around me has become smaller and smaller. The friends I relied on seeing by chance, at parties, in the pub, at launches and readings – the people I only ever saw when we were all drinking and keeping our respective silences – I no longer see. I do not hear from them either. The coldness that I defined myself by for years has started, slowly but with a fierce force, to melt away, but I am only tentatively learning how to fill the gaps left over. Empty space created by the loss of many of those I once held close but I now see do not know how to step out from the cycle of abuse. Maybe someday they will, and I hope that those I am learning to live without find their own way through the pain that suffering such as ours leaves behind. For now, though, I am trying to teach myself how to trust, how to stop assuming that everyone who wants to come close will hurt me immeasurably, that they will leave me. I am trying to learn things I have never been taught. I am trying to see myself as a thing worth sticking around for.
There is laughter – there is still laughter – being sent down for me, from places I don’t need to name. There is a kind of laughter, a type o
f joy, an enveloping from good, kind human beings – ones who accept you with all your layers of sorrow – that delivers healing.
There are things that need no language – no words – that swirl above us all, thick and black as crows, just the same on both sides of this surreal border. Like when the geese are called – up, up, and out. Then fly over, and away – back to the soil they know by heart, back to their home – and we stand, transfixed, full of something other than sorrow, other than hopelessness, other than ourselves. We stand as they fly over us, no matter where we once called home, no matter what we once knew, no matter what we have lost, on both sides of every border.
CHAPTER SIX
Delicate Ghosts
THOSE OF US WHO GROW up with a river, who spend our days – either consciously or subconsciously – mapping the course of its ethereal and surreal liquid element, lulled by its lapping, maddened by its meandering, we are shape-shifters. We are reflected and refracted. In time, as each fluid day passes, glassy and spectral, we are carried in its flow. Even those of us who have never been near to a river are affected by the water of this earth. Our insides are water and, like water, our flow is determined by things beyond our control.
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