Thin Places

by Kerri ni Dochartaigh

  Looking back, I see how important that canal was for me during those frightening, confusing times. I walked alongside it – close enough to imagine I could hear the stories it had been told over centuries: tales, like mine, of loss and shame, of weeping and of helplessness. The swans filled my dreams, the dreams that came in those funny hours between hazy dawn and the point when the light drips fully back into the world. The dream swans were often exactly like their real selves when I walked along beside them: necks entwined, heads covering dirtied white bodies on a messy nest, in the shade of tall rushes, silent and at peace. Sometimes, though, they were vicious – much wilder than any city swan I have ever known: ice-plumed and violent, talking and singing, turning the canal world into one of myth and gothic layering for fleeting, sleeping moments. I began to find myself at the canal at moments other than those when I carried my tired body back from sweaty, dirty nightclubs. I took myself to those swans in the dimpled, dappled mornings when I felt at a loss for how to bring myself to the library, to the lectures, to the coffee breaks with the others that I couldn’t afford. I watched them at different times of day, in all of the seasons; I watched them as the years of my early adulthood spun by. I saw that the canal was home to other creatures, too, many that I had never known existed in the same world as I did. It was mostly the birds that drew me close – the coots and the ducks, the thin-necked black cormorants, the geese that came and left in the sky above. But there were other things, too – rats and a single shy otter, two types of dragonfly and mayflies – so many mayflies. Butterflies and moths, too. The canal held me tightly, kept me as safe as it kept all of its other creatures in turn. It didn’t take long until I started to imagine the other places in this new, unknown city that might be able to make me feel the same way – safe for a handful of hours, my mind temporarily quietened, my body at unfamiliar ease. I went where I could just about afford on public transport, or places I could walk to. I ignored the signs that spoke of pollution on the littered strand at Sandymount, directly across from tall towers spewing out smoke, only slightly greyer than the sky it was being exhaled into. The bees that hummed through the grasses and flowers at the verges, the high-up Vs of migrating geese, the oystercatchers and turnstones – redshank and dunlin – I knew these things were keeping me away from a risk of a much more dangerous kind than any toxins that the sand held in its shards.

  I spent lots of time by the sea but never in it during my time in Dublin – countless walks along strands during sun and rain, hikes up Killiney Hill, and others I knew no name for in sleet and snow, as tears of struggle and exhaustion stung my cheeks. I remember lots of afternoons in Howth and Dun Laoghaire. I remember lighthouses and Martello towers, boats and ships, graveyards full of ivy and beautiful names kept in stone; I remember the sense that I was learning how to keep myself as visible as these things – the sense that I was filling my days as a means of making sure I stuck around.

  I left Dublin as soon as I could – just like I left Derry and just like I would leave countless places in my future. In the summer before my final year at uni, I met a man who wanted to look after me. It all happened very quickly – he had an intoxicating singsong Cork accent, he didn’t flinch when I talked of my past, and he asked no questions. We had been together – long-distance – for only a handful of months when I realised that something was wrong – very wrong – inside my body. The pain I’d been ignoring for months had finally become unbearable, and by the time I went to see a doctor I could barely walk and was bleeding my insides out at a rapid speed. I didn’t know it back then, but I would go on to have so much of those insides cut out that it would change the path of my life irrevocably. I would lose so much blood and lining. Each time cells were cut out that shouldn’t have been there it felt a little less real than the last. I felt a little less real, in turn.

  I spent lots of my final year at uni not at uni, mirroring my final year at school. I moved into the flat my partner lived in in Cork after I had my first round of surgery in Derry, travelling up and down to Dublin when I could. I managed, somehow, to graduate with the grade I’d been hoping for. By that point, I was unrecognisable to my own self, just as I had been after the chickenpox, except this time the changes to my form were on the inside as well as the outside.

  Just before my first operation, I was cleaning the kitchen of my flat by the canal. A sound made its way up off the floor of the utility room, along the kitchen and into ears that well remembered having heard such a call before. A wild river rat had made its way into the house, this time not cradled in my brother’s little boy’s hands, but of its own accord. My mind meandered back that grey afternoon, standing in a cold kitchen in the middle of Dublin city centre, to another kitchen in another city across the Irish border. We spent a while locked in each other’s presence, a spell of our own doing. It was so calm, the rat – not seeming out of place at all – rather as if we both had slipped between worlds, at ease in our individual places. At ease, even for a brief moment, in our own creaturely forms, too – no matter what anyone else may have thought of our bodies; our blood pumping beneath our skins; inside our in-between and fractured landscapes. Home, the idea of it, the thought of ever feeling safe, lost all of its weighty, scary sense in that moment. That rat, and that odd, calm moment, was a gift: a way of entering into another place, somewhere where I felt like I belonged.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Frozen Bones

  EVERY SINGLE TIME I CONJURE Cork up in my mind, every single time I remember that city in the other corner of this island from Derry, I hear the humbling, beautiful echoing of bells.

  I had moved to Cork as I was in too much pain from surgery to stay alone in Dublin, and things were not secure or solid enough for me to move in with my mum and brothers in the council house they had just moved into. They had all just left Wales, where they had been living to accommodate mum’s new husband – the leaving of whom they were all trying to deal with now that they were back in Derry. If I’m honest, I remember thinking that the further south I went the easier my past experiences in the north might be to swallow. As if they might find it easier to make themselves hidden in my guts. My partner was a man who I see now made me feel as bad about myself as I made me feel about myself, and that was really saying something. It seems such a devastating, unfair reality that often those of us who have suffered abuse of one or other form meet abuse again and again, in different forms throughout our lives. I imagined a pattern made by invisible birds that flew above my head, signalling in ways I could not help.

  Cork was an edge-land place for me. I was at an in-between stage – not quite finished university, not quite in the real world, not quite healed. I wandered the outskirts of its beating heart – alone and hopeless – scared of the emptiness I couldn’t quite drown.

  My partner was the coldest person I had ever met. He never hurt me as such, there was just no warmth, no real understanding. It was like sharing a close life with a complete stranger. It felt safe, that ice that kept us held together in the same flat, but was too thick to let us really get to know one another. I had grown colder, too. I knew I wanted nothing more than someone, somewhere, something – anything – to make me feel that I was going to be okay, but I had no clue how to make that happen. We worked long hours, apart, he and I. He spent lots of time with his family – one that wanted nothing to do with someone from a broken family like mine – and I grew more at ease with the dark feelings that, at the beginning, had shocked me to my core. I started to wake up, not just once or twice a month like before, but every single day, with suicidal thoughts.

  At first I was angry with myself for even daring to feel that way. The woman who had brought me into the world had spent years telling me that I would never really know what true suffering meant. Telling me that, due to the vast sacrifices she had made to keep me safe – leaving her family and the place she called home – I had escaped the suffering that she herself alone had experienced, that which she deemed real and true suffering. I had not l
ost my family, she told me over and over. I had not been left alone in this world; I had got lucky. From the year I turned sixteen, my mother spent much of the time she chose to be in my life telling me that the pain I had suffered was not real, was not valid. On any of the few occasions I had tried to speak with her about how I felt, of the darkness I could never shake off, she voiced her own story – one that left no room for mine to exist on the same page.

  And so I believed those things: that what had happened had in some way been my fault. I learned to hate myself more and more, in a variety of intricate ways. And why wouldn’t I? Look at what I’d grown up through, bits of death embedded in my skin, violence creeping up from shrouded places, no sense of normality anywhere, really, nowhere at all. I knew I couldn’t undo it – any of it – I couldn’t swap its darkness for light, make it into a thing much less heavy than it was. And so what was the point? What was the point in anything, at all? Things had become increasingly difficult since they’d moved back to Derry for my mum and my wee brothers. She had gone through her second divorce, and this time was no easier than the first. I had no money, no support, just worry and the fear that nothing was ever, ever going to change. I could count on a fifth of a hand the times I’d heard from my father since I’d left Derry. My partner was becoming increasingly distant. What was the point of it all?

  Breaking the silence about darkness – like thinking about it – is a very hard thing indeed. There is a weight around your neck that is much more than just yours to bear. That weight seems, at times, so feathery as to be wholly insubstantial. So light and full of nothing that you would feel ashamed to even whisper of it to another; much heavier is the weight carried by so many others. We seem set, here, as in many places, on disallowing ourselves to own our own suffering. Shame keeps us silent. I had grown up in a family and a city that had watched suffering ripple through their lines like an unstoppable wave; almost every single person I knew had suffered more than me. I knew that my ache, my darkness, the black crow inside my guts, paled into insignificance against that which everyone else seemed to be forced to carry. My trauma wasn’t hard enough earned to even try to voice it. ‘You think you’ve had it hard; how do you think I feel?’ And so you let the silence deepen, you watch it grow and ricochet across the surface of the land and sea. You bury the crow inside you deeper, deeper still, so deep that even you can pretend he isn’t there.

  In Cork it was even more effortless to remain anonymous, oddly, despite it being a much smaller city, and the people more tightly knit. The folk were held closely together by family and history, like an old Aran cardigan. I have never experienced families and groups of friends closer to each other than in Cork. No one I lived or worked with seemed to mind whether I wanted to get to know them or not, and I didn’t have enough confidence to ask to spend time with the people I met. I found it so hard to integrate at all because of anxiety, and I became more used to being on my own.

  My sorrow had begun, by then, to spread itself out underneath my skin like a dark blanket – unbearably heavy. I felt the weight of sadness under, rather than on, my chest. Loneliness and the sharp edges of loss were trying to get out from in beside my ribs. I was in my mid twenties by that stage, and had experienced repeated invasive surgery, each time feeling myself become more and more removed from my own body. I could never afford to take time off work, which in itself meant that I worked through physical pain, and wasn’t really close enough to anyone to talk about it. Colleagues would joke about needing a translator to understand me – my Derry accent was broad, concrete – and they struggled to read between its singsong cadences. I had found myself so far from the border but still the sorrow of the North dragged behind me like an echo.

  It seems now like such a fitting analogy; I couldn’t speak in any way that made people understand what was happening, how sad and lonely I was feeling. I buried words like bog-oak beneath frozen, unstable ground.

  Cork is a city that has witnessed her own fair share of violence; the red of her Rebel County flag is a hard-earned one. Nonetheless, that far south in the island, the North still feels like a foreign land to many people. In Cork I found brand new ways to forget, to conceal, to disappear. I realised only recently that after leaving Derry, all the places I ran to had one thing in common: I could get to water within a handful of moments. Cork’s source was the River Lee. The city was actually founded on the flat, swampy islands on the Lee, remembered in its name Corcaigh Mhór Mumhain – ‘The Great Marsh of Munster’. The core branch of the river rises in Gougane Barra, a wee secluded valley nestled in the Shehy Mountains where streams and rivulets flow down the steep sides of a glacial canyon, filling a lake. The Lee is associated with St Finbarr, who is said to have closely followed the river from its source to the city where he laid the foundations of his monastery. Like Cork’s saint, I too spent much of my time there mapping the flow of the River Lee – lulled from howling over into sleep by its ancient lapping too many times to recall. It felt so different from the River Foyle: softer, younger, less defined by unstoppable and ferocious hunger.

  Peering back on this period, it is a muted, foggy scene I find, as if everything back there is coated in grey dust that won’t quite shift. I have deep, almost cinematic memories of stone – grey and sacred, scattered long back but still suffused with the very same meaning that they always have held, in circles and covering holes – markers and reminders in the green, humming land. I spent lots of time on the edges of the county – Sheep’s Head Peninsula, Crow Head on the Beara Peninsula, Dingle, Kinsale, Schull – I had so much time to wander, and I went as far as I possibly could, across the county border into Kerry, too. North, west, east and south of County Cork – climbing heights in snowfall that I could never have imagined I would manage, and even now I wonder if the photographs taken at the top of mountains are real. I wonder if there is any of the girl in those snowy, blurry photographs still there inside me, and if she would recognise me in herself if we could ever stand there at the top side by side, as individual white flakes came to rest upon our faces.

  For many years I carried gorse from the Caha Mountains and heather from the sea cliffs at Crow Head – each gathered on days when I felt sure I was at the end of my own line, thoughts of suicide never too far from my days. The gorse and the heather both faded over the seasons that they bore witness to inside the pocket of my old green work jacket. Each became a dried-out reminder of that achingly beautiful, haunting landscape, of that part of my life I was convinced I wouldn’t make it through. I lost them on the move back to Derry years later, along with a handful of other things that never showed up on the other side: a blue woollen blanket from a charity shop on the Isle of Mull, a tall earthenware mug with the word ‘North’ inscribed at the bottom, bought at a car boot sale in Edinburgh one Sunday morning, and a mobile of paper whooper swans I’d had in every rented room I’d ever occupied since that one in Cork city. When those things never turned up, the first thing that came to mind was a wet, windy visit to Allihies, to see the white rock that the Children of Lir are said to be buried beneath. On that day, the hurt I was wakening to every single day – the self-hatred and the thought that I would be better off just lying down and not getting back up – felt like it had reached the lowest point possible. My grief, like Lir’s children, was buried beneath a single white rock and I didn’t know where, if anywhere, I was supposed to turn.

  I carried on, trying to pretend that everything was okay while that other part of me, the angry, scared, worried part, got worse and worse. I found myself weeping all the time, and I had no idea why and even less idea how to make it stop. I was prescribed antidepressants which I took. They made me sick, and the sense of not quite being in my own body strengthened, grew limbs. I was looking down on my own body from above. I was looking down. I was looking down, and then one day I was ready to swallow, to run, to jump in. In Cork I tried to take my own life four times. After the last of these attempts, I knew I had to leave. I left my partner, and Cork, a week lat
er, and never went back.

  Being honest about depression – about suicidal thoughts, about wanting to let that weight take you down so far that you don’t ever resurface – is absolutely terrifying. Many of us remain silent – unsure how to even begin to bring the words to the surface. Sometimes, a moment comes when you are forced out of silence – when the gag you have tied around yourself is cut. I had finally got to a stage where I understood that the past was not only drastically affecting my present but that it held the power to put an end to my future. I no longer wanted to be in this world, one that I loved so dearly but that I just didn’t feel I could take any more from. I had taken enough. Everything, every single part of being alive, had carried such sorrow and pain, and growing older wasn’t easing it, not even a tiny bit. I may have moved away from my childhood, and from the Troubles of my home but I certainly hadn’t left any of it behind. I was more than sad now; rather, I was less than sad: I had reached a point where I had swiftly started to stop feeling anything. I had become numb, and now I realise that this was the most unsafe place of all the places I had ever been.

  The darker the thoughts got, the more convinced I was that I needed to go further away from Ireland, further away from the past. Running was the only choice I ever really felt I had. It was the only thing I knew, the only course of action I had ever been shown. I left Cork on the day I decided that I would go. My graduation was due to take place that week but I did not even have the money for the bus to Dublin, let alone to rent a gown. I stayed at my mum’s and worked myself to the bone for a handful of months until I had saved enough money to make a move away from my island. I’d always been drawn to the Scottish landscape – so much like home but with what I saw as more opportunity and space to heal and to grow.