Thin Places

by Kerri ni Dochartaigh

  Like the landscape and the seas, we too have been moulded by the past. The years have turned and battered us, held us close and then spat us out; the past has been the wildest of storms and the calmest of daybreaks all in one. We have been smoothed over like a well-worn stone. Some of us have been split; others, still, are held in the bed of the sea; some of us have beautiful holes that run right through us, a hollowed-out gap through which to see. We are the landscape, and it is us. We made our past, and it made us.

  Since I returned to Derry – to the land whose suffering I still hold in a cellular, oozy place – I have found myself held by places that simply will not let me disappear under their surface. I hear the places calling to me – over and over – the pull of a moon I can never quite locate. I am often led into the sea, as if by a singing that comes from elsewhere; I swim out to meet the song, finally giving to the water all those things that were never mine to carry. In those moments of full and hauntingly cathartic surrender, when I finally lie back, sky-gaze, salt-touch, fluid-embrace, I meet myself again, as if for the first time. I own the lines and all the curves – the circle has turned, turns still, will turn always. I am in the only place I know where I am free, the place in which the silence finds the words – I am held in that delicate, beautiful and healing place, in between.

  The year 2019 began with a car bomb outside the courthouse. It went off just moments before a group of young local lads walked past. The only reason the bomb didn’t kill or injure anyone was luck, nothing more and nothing less. I sat in a hostel in Copenhagen messaging a new English friend whose house was a stone’s throw away from the bombing site. She shared how uneasy she felt talking about it all – about police escorting her into the graveyard next door and crawling like a baby on wet January ground. She thought it was ‘no big deal’, what she had experienced, in the light of the city’s past. You who had had to live through it, she said, had been well worse off. That doesn’t matter though, that doesn’t take away what she and others are now being forced to go through again, two decades after the Good Friday Agreement was supposed to ensure the end of bombs, the end of people dying, the end of people losing their homes. The potential for my friend to lose her rental home, her safe haven in a city she had only just moved to, the chance that her house might be bombed – that her belongings might be burned to dust in an act of terrifying violence – is always a big deal, I think it’s fair enough to say. It was only three months later that the young journalist Lyra McKee was killed during rioting in the city. Just a handful of weeks after Lyra’s death, a young lad was found dead in a burnt-out car around the corner from where she was shot. Here in Derry, here in Northern Ireland, we need to trust that this is all going to stop, just as swiftly as it all started up again.

  There are people living in Derry, like in many other impoverished places that have suffered vastly, who already have nothing, and who fear that the changes Brexit will bring will leave them with even less. Their lives are, and have always been, filled with plaguing, unending worry and fear, with anger and hunger, none of which they have ever been taught how to deal with.

  There was always hunger, so much hunger. It crept up on you like a forgotten name of someone lost. The hunger was never really just about food, although the city has had a shortage of that for many centuries. We simply never had enough – enough of anything – to feel like we were real. I hated it. I hated that sense of longing – that craving – that feeling of losing, being repeated over and over and over. I watched as funding was cut for almost every good thing that came to the city, as people talked about unemployment and poverty – about how we all left once we’d got our education, how everyone always left. Mental health funding, hostels for alcohol and drug addicts, suicide prevention groups: cuts to services this city really – desperately – needs. Loss is not an easy thing to live alongside. The way the city of Derry has continually seemed set on breaking itself up even further made me angry for decades. My city seemed to be in permanent self-destruct mode. It felt to me, even as a teenager, that we must somehow have deserved the nothingness that we had been given. That somewhere, far back, we must have done something so awful that our city was being punished: an ancient archaic penance. TV, films, the radio, they were all full of places where life seemed to be following a different – easier – path. A path where good things could and did happen. Where you could choose to stay in your hometown, free from fear, free from hunger for something more – something easier, something safe. Other places seemed like places where people weren’t always being forced to leave, where people could choose to stay.

  At what point does a thing cease to be whole? How much breakdown does it take to bring you to breaking point, to broken point? When does a city become merely a severed ghost of itself?

  When Mum moved away to Edinburgh, my brother and I moved back to Derry to live with our granny and granda until we finished our exams. It was a temporary fix – when my A-Levels were done I was heading off to university, and that would really and truly be the end of that period of my life, those early years moving from place to place, and never really sure how to get through. I hadn’t even seen the house my mum and her then husband were moving into, and I knew that I would never live there anyway as I was setting off into solo, adult life that year. I was very close to my grandparents but the house they were living in at that time wasn’t the one they had lived in for most of my life, so it felt a wee bit unknown too, like I was really only passing through. So, at just-turned-seventeen, I tried to accept that the desire for a ‘home’ – somewhere I felt safe, at ease, like I belonged – was something I needed to let go of.

  I remember so clearly the afternoon at school when I realised that if I stood any chance at making a secure life for myself, it was going to mean really working – working as hard as I could possibly manage. And so I started. I studied every single day, for as long as I could, and as hard as I could. I was in an exceptionally competitive grammar school, and I joined the Oxbridge group, all of us battling it out to get the best grades, to have the most interesting personal letter for our applications; even then I felt like an outsider constantly. I had never had, and never would have, the same background as the others. Silence became my way out. I didn’t feel anchored, even when I was with really kind people; I felt, always, too much on the periphery to really step inside – to really get close and make proper, lasting friendships. It became the resounding theme of my relationships – all of them. At work, with partners and friends, when you know you are keeping back so very much about your background and experiences, hiding away who you are, it is hard to see how any real intimacy could be created.

  I worked as hard as I could to get the grades I needed to get into Trinity College Dublin, where I studied English Literature and Classical Civilisation. I hadn’t realised it at the time but this move across the border was possibly the most meaning-laden event of my life. The decision – almost a non-decision in how casually I made it – reflected the need in me, the want. A want for things to be different, just. For the past to loose its bleeding and bloodied grip. For the marks left imprinted on me to fade, even just a little bit – enough to make me feel human.

  As seems to so often be the way with me, the move came wrapped up tightly in difficulties and weirdness. A week before my exams began – a few months after my brother and I had moved into my granny and granda’s house – I contracted adult chickenpox. I woke up one night to a blinding headache and the oddest type of queasiness. The next morning I was covered in chickenpox for the second time in my life, something I was fairly sure just didn’t happen. My skin was like a foreign land. Trying to study in that level of pain was hard going, to say the least. My memories of those last months at school – not at school, rather – are of my granda coaxing me from sleep to learn sections of Virgil’s Aeneid off by heart. Of him sitting up with me into the wee small hours learning about the history of nationalism and unionism on our island, the Romantic poets and women in the Greek world. I sat all my ex
ams in my grandparents’ kitchen – my sick breaks in the bathroom being timed, the lovely study warden taking the boxes of tablets in my granny’s cupboard apart, searching for cheat notes that weren’t there. I managed, somehow, to get the grades and I was well enough – only just – to start my degree when I was due to, that October.

  I had planned to move in with my friend from school, whose dad had bought her a flat in Dublin, and to whom I had already paid the deposit. But she had already started to suffer at the hands of mental illness. I hadn’t seen her for most of the summer, and when I did see her, just a month before we were due to embark on our university life together, she was more unrecognisable than I’d been that summer. Anorexia and bulimia, combined with a harsh daily exercise regime, had left her a frail shell of herself. The hardest part to process though was the change in her personality. The person I knew and loved, I hoped, was still there – underneath a confused knot of self-hatred. I only fully understood when she died, this spring, that she’d spent half of her life battling with her own self, with parts of herself that scared her. I am still trying to find ways to honour the girl I knew and loved before that summer we turned eighteen. She started, that summer, to take the actions and words of those she knew and loved, and twist them in on themselves – like an eel hauled from the belly of the sea, out of place and lost in translation. She went from begging me to live with her – she would die if I didn’t – to wanting to leave her options open – she might want to leave the room empty for all the new friends she would meet on her course. My stomach flipped and rocked, fearful and stuck at the in-between parts of her storm. Next her dad wanted her to live alone so he could visit to check up on her – I had no idea what each new day would bring as I packed my books into boxes, leaving the address section for delivery unwritten. Finally, the week of moving came. My friend’s dad rang me on my granny’s land-line and told me under no circumstances was I to move in with his sick daughter. I had to listen, of course. I had to abandon a friend I loved dearly, for her own – and my own – good. I see now that this, the starting of my adult life, came wrapped in as much confusion, fear and worry about the idea of ‘home’ as any time before it. Moving out on my own had always felt, when I’d imagined it, to be the answer: the point when it would all ease and I would find safe harbour, feel rooted. The line I was walking was the same line I’d always walked, except this time I was utterly alone.

  My student loan didn’t come through in time and I now had nowhere organised to live. All of the signs seemed pointed towards the idea that Dublin wasn’t meant to be, but I buried my head deep and carried on. My dad, who I had not seen properly for years by then, decided all out of nowhere that he wanted to drive me and my stuff to Dublin. I’m still not really sure where that came from, why he wanted to do it, but in letting him, I was learning to be softer; I was making room inside. Our family unit had broken so devastatingly I think we all still bear the scars decades later. Perhaps my turning eighteen – twice the age I was when he left us – triggered something in him, created a gap that he felt he might be able to dip through, to take the first steps towards getting to know his first-born child again.

  I didn’t hear from Dad again for most of my four years at university, though, and for many years afterwards. We only really found a way to communicate as the strangers we had become when I was in my late twenties, living in Edinburgh. The path we learned to walk towards a shared future was not an easy one, and we still have much work to do, but I am willing to trust – and trust is such a gift.

  It seemed a fruitless search, half of my life ago, trying to find somewhere affordable to live in Dublin, and I only had the limited funds I’d managed to save and some that I’d borrowed from my grandparents until my loan finally came through weeks later. My boss at my part-time job knew a woman who was renting out rooms, miles out of Dublin city centre, and I jumped at that straight away. And so, one early October Sunday, my father collected me and my boxes and drove us across the border – crossing lines both invisible and contemptuous, surreal and unbelievable – into my adult life in Dublin.

  Dublin was both all I had imagined it would be and, at the same time, constantly shifting, its anonymous otherness seemed born afresh each day. I loved my course but something about the whole beautifully ancient city just didn’t quite fit; I didn’t fit. I wandered around, wraith-like, trying to make my soles slot neatly into the ghost footprints left by those before me – traces of lost souls – dragging themselves over cobblestones, through infamous landmarks and along the Liffey. But I could never drop the feeling of deep sadness I felt. I watched as friends went ‘home’ for weekends and study leave, and I was able to go to my grandparents, of course, but it just never felt like anywhere was really my place; nowhere felt like home. I always thought that it was jealousy that I felt towards my classmates, that stinging sense of them having something that kept them in place in the world, allowing their sense of self to take root. But now I don’t think it was jealousy; the way I felt wasn’t just about me or what I felt I didn’t have. The world just didn’t seem fair, and I didn’t know how to make it all change. In my family we walked on eggshells around each other. There was so much pain, and none of us had been shown how to talk about it. Silence took over, which – although better than shouting, threats and broken bonds – is utterly detrimental, and exceptionally hard to untangle yourself from. Not being allowed to voice your pain, being told you are misremembering or are wrong, being made to feel like you have no right to move on, that your suffering is less valid – your hurt of less worth – leaves you in a place it feels near impossible to crawl back from.

  I moved every few months as the rent in Dublin went up – I lived there at the height of the ‘Celtic Tiger’, making the city even more difficult to manage – and worked long hours alongside studying, jostling to keep up with classmates who could afford to keep renting their flats over the summer, go away at weekends exploring, go on holidays together to Italian villas during the Easter break. It began to grind me down – every single bit of it – leaving dusty trails of resentment at my tired feet. I hated myself for feeling that way. Those first few years I was in Dublin the whole new world of social media had sprung up in full force. I didn’t have a laptop, so it all felt a little odd to me; I stayed on the outside of its alien perimeters and watched as my classmates grew closer, this time from different rooms, buildings, countries. I could never afford somewhere to live in a good, safe area, so I ended up living in ten different flats – each more or less as bad as the other – during the four years I was at university. They were often spaces where I didn’t even really want to sleep, let alone spend any waking hours. Lots of my time was spent in Trinity – at lectures and in the library – and the bulk of the rest of it was spent working in the jobs I needed in order to scrape by. Most people I knew who worked did one or two shifts so they could go to gigs, for dinner or to save for travelling in the long summers off. The differences between my lived experience and that of my classmates seemed to widen and widen as time went by. One of the girls in my circle of friends struggled so much to believe that I really was supporting myself through uni (aside from my student loan – which wouldn’t have even paid my rent) that she genuinely thought I just didn’t want to be her friend when I refused to go out salsa dancing for the third Friday in a row. Eventually she grasped the fact that I worked every single weekend night throughout university, apart from the one she talked me into taking off to celebrate her twenty-first.

  Now I see how much easier it would have been if I’d felt comfortable sharing my background a bit more honestly, if I had just stopped trying to pretend I was a different person from the one I was. The more I noticed how my classmates’ lives compared to mine, the more I retreated into my own shell. For quite some time I had tried to carefully mould myself and my past into the outlines they all shared; no matter where they came from there seemed to be a bright, common thread that ran through their pasts like a beacon. I could see it – that thing tha
t they had all shared together but I couldn’t decipher the language it spoke. I tried to shape the words, words that would explain why I might seem a little different from them all, but they caught on the insides of my gums; the truths I was scared to share hid in the enamel of my teeth. I searched for ways to try to explain the kind of life I had lived – growing up always ready to leave, on alert, scared all the time and never really sure what the things I was feeling were called, or how to make them stop. I was a grown adult but I spent every day in Dublin feeling like a lost, scared child. It had all come too quickly and with no real help, proper planning or support. Suddenly I was in the second stage of my life, with no idea how to make it all work, how to make the sorrow ease.

  I didn’t realise it back then, like lots of things we often are blind to at the time, but even from those very early days of being properly on my own in the world, I sought solace in whichever safe spaces I could find outside. I wasn’t that wee girl with her microscope and her worrying silence in that concrete Derry back garden any longer, but I was still just as scared. I was still as lost. If anything, in fact, things had got worse – the fear had magnified, and my silence, born decades earlier, and nurtured ever since, like a promise made, was still thick as ice, and even more unbreakable.

  I gave up trying to fit in. I gave in to the blurred beat of the past, its echoes reaching the surface, still, no matter how much I tried to muffle them.

  I studied hard, and worked harder again, in jobs I hated and that left me bone-tired and only just managing to pay my bills. I worked various daytime jobs – delivering flyers for nightclubs, raising money on the street for children with a condition that made their skin as fragile as a butterfly’s, selling at markets, and other things I know I must have done but have lost from my memory. I worked nights in a hotel a short walk from the canal for most of my time at university, finishing my shifts anywhere between three and six in the morning on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.