Thin Places

by Kerri ni Dochartaigh

  I kept thinking about my grandfather, and his childhood. By his bed he had always kept the most striking photograph of his mother. She is almost warrior-like in that picture, gazing past the camera towards a place unknown. Piercing eyes, a long neck – taut, like a swan’s – an air of the otherworldly in her stance. I both loved and hated that image, that woman. Her ancestral draw was so extreme that it called to me, siren-like, even through the cheap and flimsy paper that could never dare to capture her on its surface. There is a restlessness to her hands, a hunger in the way she holds herself. Despite the black and white of the print, there is no sense of her being in the shadows. After he died I printed a copy of that picture of my grandfather’s mother and put it up in the bathroom of my flat. A desire came over me to be able to see her when I wanted to, to nurture an odd sense of intimacy with the image of her – with her ghost, I suppose. To be in some form of communion with the woman who I felt had so utterly failed the man I loved more than any other by abandoning him at such a young age, by leaving him to cope in this world almost completely on his own. It was her I wanted to see after he died, not her son. It was her that his death helped me to make peace with: that shade of a woman I had never met, one whom I had felt anger towards for decades. Abandonment, like loss, is an odd thing to unravel. It stands on shaky ground. It has thin roots. Those roots are remarkably long, and they are see-through; the damage they do is utterly invisible.

  In the last January I spent in Edinburgh, a handful of months after he died, I used the money my grandfather left me to go to Iceland. I was thirty, only just, and I had lost the man I held as my rock in stormy times. I was living a life that looked nothing like how I always thought it would, how I so much wanted it to look. I was drinking every single evening. I was drinking alone. I was drinking to try to forget, to pretend, to mask; I was drinking to try to silence the things that kept creaking and clawing at me like a wild thing trying to get out. When he had died months earlier, I’d known within days what I would do, where I would go to try to grieve him. So I journeyed, in the snow and sleet, in rain that blinded and cut, through as much of the island as I could access. I was trying to find another way to deal with trauma: one that looked different from how it always had before. The most vivid memory I have is of a day spent in Vik – a secluded village, on a beach that is as black as soot. It is the most intense memory of the trip – spent entirely outdoors, in the misty depths of winter.

  It was early January. Everything was grey, wolf-howling and grief-laden. My grandfather’s face filled my mind, his words danced above the tall, untethered waves just beyond. I remember wondering if the place could sense my sorrow, wondering if my grief could reach the bleak black basalt of the farthest rocks, in fading view. I gathered pebbles, their wet exterior shocked my fingers every time. The caves around the bay seemed like they were gathering something, too. They scooped up the winds, held them in their hollowed interiors until they decided the time had come to spit them back out into the world. The winds taken captive by the caves moaned and called. They sounded like they were answering the skuas and the Arctic terns, the fulmars and the kittiwakes. I remember standing there, curling my shoulders in around my shivering body, thinking about keening – that old, near-lost way of making grief audible, not quite visible but able to be heard. There was no one else around me, the other travellers were in the tea-room, and I threw myself into a fierce gust of wind. The moment shifted and turned, there on that northerly black beach. The light felt weightless. Things that had been so heavy until then lifted, and a soft, untouchable moment came – time held somewhere in-between. I felt held in a place other than where I was.

  I wailed and shook. It felt like I was standing in a place that I had been before. I imagined my grandfather was there by my freezing, hurting side. I keened for him, and honoured the loss that might still leave room for hope. It felt as if I was about to be thrown back into the solid world, but then straight away I felt like I was drawn in even deeper, held even tighter. I remember the sense of being in a long, thin tower of light, and of stillness.

  It passed, the light and the stillness, and I found myself properly back on the soft black sands – even though of course I hadn’t left there at all. I could hear again, then, the sound of wild birds screeching sharply in the sky. It felt as if they were lamenting some form of loss, too, on that haunting black stretch of land.

  Grief is sometimes a black bird of sorrow; other times, though, it is an altogether different creature. Sometimes, when grief comes, it is full of colours that you have never seen before. You have to choose what you will do then – if you will stay with it or not, as it comes in and out of your view. Sometimes, when grief comes, you must choose if you will run, run, run – or if you will stay with it, if you will lay your body down, in time with the chiming of ancient bells.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Echoing Grief

  WHAT DO WE DO WHEN we name a thing? We carry it from there to here – from then to now – we make room for it in a place deep inside of our being.

  What do we do when someone takes away the names of those things that we have named? When we lose the words for what we hold dear? When language splinters and shatters? When the things that mean so much to us become stuck in the bog, so far down that we think that they are gone, so far down that we think that we have gone, along with them?

  What do we do when we lose the way back to the things we have named?

  What do we do when the lights go out in the harbour?

  When we lose the harbour itself? What do we do when we lose the way, when we lose our way? When we are caught in the mud and the silt, and we don’t know how to come back from the places underneath?

  •

  When sorrow hit me in Edinburgh, I felt sure I needed to move. I convinced myself the right place was waiting for me – a safe place I could finally call home.

  I moved to Bristol to teach in another Steiner school, something I had never really wanted to do in the first place. It was the ‘safe’ option – one that eased the fear a little, of being in my thirties with no stability, incapable of forming lasting relationships, and unable to stay in one place long enough to make any real go of a life. Teaching allowed me to bury my head in the sand – through the high demands placed on me I had neither time nor energy to even think about dealing with my past. Teaching made me feel as if it was okay to not really be me. Bristol, much as I might have tricked myself into thinking it the turning point of my life, was, just like every other place I’d run to, merely another murky coordinate on the map. Looking back, though, I see that in spite of the confusion and sorrow that still filled my days, the road was widening, even back then. The path was still just as muddy, but I had begun to find a way through. I was not yet upright but I was no longer down on my knees.

  I’d been there just over a week when I started my new job. The first day, I came home and headed straight into the garden – full of piercing sunlight reflected off the coat of an urban fox that was curled up on the tin shed’s roof. I was reading a book called Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, and was finding such resonance in it. The fact that there could be other crows, belonging to other people, made me feel like maybe I could talk a little about my crow out loud. I had begun in those early days in Bristol to really think about grief. And I had stopped batting the thoughts away when they came.

  About how grief does not speak the same language as our everyday existence.

  How grief is not linear; how it is not even circular. How it grows and mutates, shape-shifts and hides. I still don’t know if there is anywhere for grief to go; I still don’t know if it ever does go away.

  On how grief is not always, though it is sometimes, coal-black as a crow.

  How grief is more the moth than the butterfly. Of how moths, in their own way, grieve also. How grief is not always found in the dark – how it might live in bright places, too.

  How moths are so unbearably beautiful – achingly so, in fact.

  I had beg
un – tentatively – in Bristol to see a future version of me that might not always be so weighed down. I still mostly felt worthless and heavy. I still felt it might be easier not to be here at all. But there was something that had not been there ever before. For the very first time, there was a hint of something right underneath the surface – of something silent and still – something good. It would take me years, still, to name it.

  •

  I was sitting on the back doorstep, in the full glow of the white-yellow sun, reading that book with its crow and its grief, and wondering what we are all to do with all of the sorrow, with the loss that curls up beside so many of us. My mobile beeped on the table in the kitchen behind me, despite the fact that there was no signal to be had in the downstairs of any flat on that entire street. I left the book and got up to check my mobile. The next part happened so quickly that I have never – to this day – properly been able to process it all. The next thing I knew, a sound came unlike any I had ever heard before. It was the sound of glass shattering into hundreds of small pieces, of things being broken that could never be joined to one another again. And, mixed in, there was the sound of a man screaming – the one who was renovating the upstairs flat, the flat whose rotted window-frame had just fallen onto the still warm back doorstep of my new home, the spot in which I’d been sitting less than a minute before. That sound of screaming, like an animal, above and all around me. The sound of someone who was sure he had killed the new girl downstairs. He hadn’t though, we ascertained together when he arrived banging at the front door, in convulsions of hysterical weeping. It was the first time he’d cried since his mother had died a fortnight previously, he told me through his sobs. It was her old home he was gutting, just above my new one. We stood together in a hot pink Bristol kitchen – one I had yet to even cook in. We stood quietly taking in the scene before our grateful eyes. The book I’d been reading before it had happened was still in its place, on the back doorstep. No part of me was underneath the debris – the shards of glass and all of the rotted wood. The sound of that glass smashing into hundreds of broken parts, as a grieving grown man cried like a banshee, made me feel like I’d been held upside down and plunged into icy cold water.

  I felt parts of me kicking out that I hadn’t known were still there. Enough of me was jolted alive – dragged out of the ghost I’d faded into – to know that the time had come to resurface from the Underworld. I could hear the spluttering and choking inside me of someone no longer ready to drown.

  I began to drag that not-ghost of myself from place to place, again, just as I had in Scotland, just as I had in Ireland, through the outside world of England and Wales. I cycled along the canal to woods, community farms, hills, quiet hamlets and bustling harbour-sides. I took my slowly, delicately waning sorrow on trains and buses – alongside fields and tracks, rivers and streams, to get off at the sea, the mountains, the chalky cliffs I still dream of. There was no one calling my phone on Sunday evenings any more, to check I’d been outside my flat, so instead I stood outside, alone, on the wet streets of Montpelier – with a bottle of red wine I’d begged myself not to buy wrapped in brown paper by the man at the corner shop with his kind smile. I do not remember a single Sunday evening, no matter how wolf-lunged the weather was, when I didn’t walk the length of my street and down the hill to that corner shop to buy the thing that I knew was both numbing and breaking me up. I do not remember a single Sunday evening without standing holding that bottle, delaying letting it enter my eager body as long as I could, under a city sky never quite black enough to feel like night, silently telling the night birds where I had been. Letting the birds of the evening branches, in a tree beside an old church, on a colourful street in inner-city Bristol, take the place of my grandfather on the other end of a phone-line. Sometimes, on such Sunday evenings, my strength felt a little fiercer, more vocal, and I would walk with the brown-papered parcel right past the front door of my flat into the neighbour behind ours – St Paul’s. The men who congregated in the square there had moved to Bristol at some or other point along their blood line, some in their own lifetime but many at a point of the line too hazy to see from where they now stood, grey smoke dancing from whatever substance filled their various contraptions and vessels. On those strong Sundays, I would go right up to them, close enough that the beats from their box boomed inside my heart, and I would offer them the unopened wine, ‘eeehhhhh’ and ‘ahhhhhh’s, and grateful, jibing laughter being offered to me in return. It seems unreal, and I suppose a little unbelievable, as many true things are – but every single time, no matter which of the four of my seasons in Bristol, when I gave that wine away, I shared the laneway back to my flat with a wild creature. Once it was a jay calling to the branches above him like a mother scolding her babe. Another night it was a tree full of long-tailed tits; twice it was pied wagtails making a shadow-show on the once-white wall beside the house, with its wild pink poppies peeking out through concrete cracks. Too many times to count, though, it was a red fox – as urban as the one I had known before was wild. A silent fox – blood-red, unbidden.

  There were so many foxes in Bristol that I began to dream myself as one.

  Here I am, trailing my way – hushed and secretive – through darkness that shrouds the city, making a yowling widow’s cloak of Leigh Woods. Now I am tearing through allotments – higher, faster, faster, higher – rummaging my way through compost heaps, scraps and peelings silencing the baying my brazen-furred belly fires up to the full moon. Now you see me drinking the River Avon dry – my beast-tongue lapping and licking, slurping and dripping; the water is not water now, you see. I am a wild fox, and I am drinking scarlet-red liquid: blood and wine are my creaturely hydration in these dreams.

  Now I am a human again, a woman, and I am thinking of a real night – nearing the midway point of the only autumn I spent in Bristol. It is a planet-bright night, still and shushed. Starlings wheel and cry in the sky above the harbour, a miniature but mighty murmuration. I do not need the coat that I am wearing, and I cannot properly walk in the clogs that I am edging along in towards Colston Hall to meet a new friend and listen to old music: Joanna Newsom, singing songs that have punctuated my sadness for years, with their notes as high-pitched and rare as I imagine those of an albatross to be. I have already downed a bottle of wine, and during the gig I drink furiously, ferociously, like the fox that I have seen myself as in the wine-dark nights. A guy I have been seeing for the last while is there, a few seats behind us, and afterwards he asks me to go for a drink at a pub called the Christmas Steps. My friend lives just down the hill, at the harbour, and she wants to get back to her warm boat, her warm bed, her warm man. I trot off with this man, this typographer, this man who is as cold as all of the ones I ever seem to draw towards me, like a reflection in a frosted mirror. At the pub, I drink and drink and drink, and a moment comes when I am in the toilet, having thrown up most of the crimson sea I have downed, feeling the pull of the river that I know is within spitting distance of this mirror I cannot will myself to look at. Back down to the typographer, who does not bat an eyelid when I tell him I am going – face red from vomiting, salt-streaked like the barren shores of Donegal, and just as wild. I run, then, in wooden shoes that I can barely even walk in, knowing I must drag myself away from the harbour before the water’s hungry call mingles with the fluid in the porcelain-white corridor of my ear.

  I reach the streets of Montpelier before I realise I am being followed. I cross the street, I slow down, I speed up, I cross back over again. At the part where I take my phone from my bag as if to text, he coughs up a hearty, sarcastic laugh. We both know there is no signal here for at least as many streets as I can count on the fingers my phone is cradled in. I remember the latch on my door, how stiff it’s been all week, how hard it’s been to unlock. I remember how tightly buckled these clogs are to try to help me to walk, how hard they would be to kick off, to give me even half a chance to flee the man who I now see is stroking silver in his right palm like a b
lade of grass. I think of how timely it all feels: the first moment when I have actually run from the desire to end my own life, I end up within arm’s length of someone who looks like he might want to end it for me. When the sound comes – piercing and ghostly, arriving from somewhere increasingly close, vibrating around the Bristol street – it lasts the whole way through his looking at me as though it is me making the sound. It lasts the whole way through him booting up the hill in front of us like a startled beast. It lasts the whole way until I see them both – the creatures that are making the sound – two urban foxes in their vicious dance before mating. Their noise only stops when I startle them, sending them into the scrub of the laneway between two abandoned houses, shaken out of their shared moment by the sound of wooden shoes on top of grey concrete.

  •

  Not quite a year into living in Bristol, nursing yet another hangover and a terrifying sense of breaking point, I took myself on my own to Cornwall for the very first time.

  I stayed in an old, tall hostel in St Ives. The light had trickled out nearly completely from a purple-grey sky full of gulls that called to each other, and which turned in the space as if on ropes, on that first night in Cornwall. The winds held a storm inside them. I remember sun that bled out from above the trees and the rooftops, and left a stain across the night’s lines; the moment was one of something being halved, and halved again. Then, the wind died down – almost utterly – leaving no trace behind. The magpies on the roof of the cinema across from my room sensed something that should not be there – a creaturely otherness, unbidden, unwelcome – and they made it known.