Thin Places

by Kerri ni Dochartaigh

  I was utterly alone, and was the smallest and the last one to be let on the ship. I was weeping so hard that I couldn’t walk in a straight line – my bony shoulders bashed against the wet iron, the metal of the vessel seemed sure to break me. And then the dream shape-shifted and the quay, which had been the departure point, became the destination. We were in Liverpool. We were in India. We were at the most north-westerly tip of Mull. We were in the whiteness at the bottom of Iceland. We were less than a mile further up the river from whence we left. The ship was being thrown around in the blackness by waves sent from an unknown place. We were told to jump – into the blackness, into the unknown, into the belly of the darkness.

  I could feel the fear ripping my insides out and firing them up to the starless sky. I could trace my body’s borderlines; I could see the death of me coming to meet the life of me on that river. I woke from the dream as we made for land.

  I cannot remember the long walk from Dublin Port to the bus depot in the dark, snow-sludged hours before the morning – too early for buses, too shaken to want to take a taxi. I cannot remember the landmarks, nor any sense of fear or upset at arriving over a day later than we were due to because of the storm. I cannot remember what I ate at the port in Wales or how I spent the long, cold, delayed hours. I cannot remember if I realised then or not that something in me had broken so drastically that I was very lucky I had managed that journey across the sea at all.

  I cannot remember paying for the bus ticket to Derry. I cannot remember if the driver was male or female, if the radio was on or not, if the snow was still falling on the bus that brought me from Dublin to Derry, the first bus to drive that route on Easter Saturday in 2015.

  I cannot remember if I even clocked it at the time, but because of the storm that had howled across the Atlantic, right as I left one life to start a new one, the first morning I would waken in Derry would be the day of the year I found hardest of all. I first ran from an unsafe home as a toddler on an Easter Sunday more than three decades before the one on which I moved back to Derry. I now can’t remember what they called that Easter storm of four years ago, if it even had a name at all.

  I remember trying to pretend it wasn’t Easter Sunday. Covering my ears in the small kitchen of my partner’s home in the very heart of the Bogside, as Republican marchers commemorated the Easter Rising, a day almost a century beforehand. We’d only been together – long distance – for three months when I broke down so badly in Bristol that I thought I was going to die. The doctor advised me to think of the person I felt safest around, and allow them to look after me, if they would. M and I had spent time together when I’d been in Derry at Christmas. There was a twenty-two-year age difference, hundreds of miles between where we lived, and he had teenage children who were still a huge part of his life. Still, though, in spite of all the things that made it feel like a badly fated set-up, when I reached rock bottom throughout the rest of that winter in Bristol and into the spring, he was the only person I called. He was the first and only person I’d ever told – at the exact moment of feeling it – that I wanted to take my own life. He did everything within his power to listen, to understand, to help, to stay. Despite the fact that we barely knew one another, the bulk of our communication having been over the phone – each of us in different countries – as soon as I told him I thought moving back to Derry might be essential for my healing, he offered his home as the place I would come to. We didn’t talk about how early in our relationship it was, or worry about the state I was in, or the trouble that would be thrown into both of our paths. The moment I arrived off the bus that Easter, he handed me my own key for the door.

  In his small galley kitchen – bright green shelves and kitsch deer, vintage Pyrex and black plastic bulls off the end of Spanish wine bottles – a new mug sat alongside all of his much-loved ceramics, bought to welcome me into his fiercely private space. It took years to realise how important the gift of that mug was, both for me and for my relationship with the concept of home.

  I remember lying in the bath for the first time in that new terraced house that afternoon and counting back the years as though they were wooden beads on a string. I had been three that Easter Sunday when we ran from my first home – a tall Victorian townhouse in a seaside resort at the end of the train line from here. Twenty-eight years ago, not to the exact date of that Sunday, I’d say, but to the holy day it represented. I would never again set eyes on my maternal grandfather. I would go on, from that day, to run from home after home – often on the very day it was decided I would leave, just like that Easter Sunday. I would force myself, at various points in adulthood, to return to that house, long after the inhabitants I had once known had left. I would stand outside, flooded by the small details that I still remembered: red velvet, the smell of roast beef, my grandfather’s hands, grateful that the worse ones – the memories that didn’t bear thinking about – seemed to be gone for ever.

  M was the only person I felt close to back then. He turned up in my life in the midst of such unthinkable trauma. He is the only person who has done everything he could to keep me safe. When I recall how I treated him in the early days of our relationship I am still almost broken by shame. He was the only one who never hurt me, but he was the only one I fought. I had never, even in my darkest days, retaliated, no matter how badly I’d been treated by others. Here I was, having found someone who treated me with care and love – for the first time in my life – and I was attacking him with every ounce of strength I had inside me. Unbidden, undeserved and without any warning, I pushed and shoved and screamed. I threatened and threw, ridiculed, berated: I abused, I abused, I abused. We had been together less than half a year when I told him that if I took my own life it would be his fault. All that he had done was to love me, and the shock of it left me mirroring many of the disgusting things I had experienced myself – but now I was the one carrying out the abuse. I was hurtling towards becoming exactly like so many people I had already started to shed from my life, and the realisation hit me like a body hitting icy water.

  There were nights at the beginning of living with M in Derry when I would walk to each of the bridges that span the river, clamber over them and – on two occasions – be dragged away. One night it was by an older lady I had never before seen, on another it was by someone with a face I knew but could not place. I remember the blackness, how high the tidal waters were on each of those nights, how slippery the moss-coated stones, how high the moon-bleached reeds. I cannot remember walking to a variety of different gates in the historic Derry Walls. I do know that I told the person I loved that I was going to jump – in person, in text, on the line of a mobile phone. I cannot remember how much alcohol was involved – so much alcohol, every single day. I don’t remember how much I drank. I do remember my partner’s face as he wept.

  I remember erasing note after note drafted on my phone trying to convince myself there was no point in me still being here. I remember having to continue as normal, as if nothing bad had happened. Derry felt just as it always had in many respects but also like a foreign land. The streets all looked the same, my family set-up felt just how it always had, but I felt like I belonged there even less than I had before despite now having a supportive partner, and a safe place to call home. I was trying to help M run his business, trying to get to know any of the people in and around my age in Derry, but there were very few – almost everyone I knew before had moved away because they had found living there too much of a struggle. Things were hard for M and me for a long time after I moved in, and we had no one we could turn to. Things like trauma, and the impact on a home environment, are difficult topics to broach. I told my mother and father of these things, only once, on separate occasions, crying out for help. It never came. It has never been spoken of by either of them to me since.

  When I think back to those first months in Derry I see the silvered reflection of the metal on the old railway track ‘out the line’, beneath a bright crescent moon, the night my life was at
the most risk. I see reeds that I remember from childhood, moss that glows as though it is from another planet; I see birds of the night – hunting and haunting their prey. I remember the fear inside me that things would never change, as I lay in the cold beneath a Brutalist concrete bridge with night lorries speeding over it.

  I could not see a way through. A way out. A future. I could not think of a way to keep myself away from that river. How I might ever keep my head above water. I did not yet know that there is none of it, not one single, solitary part, that is my fault. I could not see, back then, that I did not deserve those things that happened. That the way I felt would, one day, leave me. That it may still resurface, at times of darkness, but that I might have found safe passage.

  I imagined, in moments of panic and confusion, growing old alone. I imagined the broken family I come from becoming ever more distant. I imagined M throwing me out, and I wonder now if I was actually trying to push him into doing it, in some twisted form of further self-harm.

  I could not imagine a way through it all. I could not imagine a future. I could not imagine that I would ever learn to talk about things that I went through, that I was made to keep silent about for decades. Most of all, back then, I could not imagine healing.

  I could not imagine there ever being a Sunday morning, sober and full of gratitude, where I would watch birds lift up from a yew tree into the waiting arms of the winter storm.

  I could not imagine the future that still lay in wait for me, like a soft seed.

  I could not imagine light, so much light – light like a flock of white birds in a winter sky.

  •

  When I returned there, to that city of oaks, built on the banks of the River Foyle, just as I had when I’d moved to every other place I’d run to, I thought it was for good. The details of the first few years, all the ins and outs that came together to make an image, like an old photograph, fade into the grey of memory. There was unrivalled, harrowing trauma coming back to me day in and day out. It came from the very beginning, as though the lid of a pot had been lifted off, and every single ounce of fluid was evaporating before my eyes. Like a river that had burst its banks. Like ice beginning to thaw. I was utterly out of control, out of my depth, and I had no idea where to turn. Nightmares, fevers, panic attacks – all things I knew well from previous episodes of life, but now they were a different shape. The triggers that had once been few and far between now surrounded me at all angles. When M told me in the summer that there hadn’t been a single week since I’d moved back that I hadn’t spoken of taking my own life, he begged me to make an appointment to speak to the doctor. I was seen immediately. The GP told me that I should have seen someone long, long back. That I should have been signed off work in Bristol – that I should maybe even have had a proper break from work as far back as Edinburgh. He looked at the record in front of him, listened to only the briefest of outlines of the life I’d lived, and said that I should feel very proud of how I’d managed to get through. He told me – the very first time I had ever heard the words come from anyone’s mouth – that I did not deserve to feel the way I felt any longer. I didn’t weep in his room. I didn’t shake. I was too numb to even speak.

  I had finally told someone about things that had happened to me but that I had grown used to leaving out. I told him how even thinking about trying to talk of these things to my family – people who know almost all of it, people who also went through it – makes me want to kill myself. I told him that I cannot undo any of the thick knots. I told him that I am drinking myself to death. That I am wandering barefoot in my nightie in the Bogside, out at the old abandoned railway line, through the marshes that are the marker between the land and the river. I told him that I don’t know who I am underneath it all, that I am worried I’m becoming the same as people who have hurt me so deeply. I told the doctor, on that bright day in June 2016, that I was scared, so scared, and that I needed to make it all stop. He placed me on the priority list for therapy and counselling. He found me a way to talk about the various forms of abuse that I had carried for decades, the trauma I had dragged from place to place for my entire life. I started therapy that summer, a handful of months after returning to Derry, and I stayed in therapy for a full year.

  During that year, the suicidal thoughts did not go away completely. They did not ease much at all, in fact. The drinking every day and wandering the streets at all hours of the morning did not stop. I continued to walk out of my new home feeling certain that it was for the very last time. I still found myself at the river during that year. But something was different; something was changing. Through therapy – the hardest thing I have ever done – I was given a safe place in which to break the silence I had carried for decades. Week in, week out, through the first four seasons I spent in my hometown as an adult, I was told, over and over, by someone I trusted, that I was allowed to feel how I felt. I was allowed to share, without judgement, the way I felt about myself and others – those still here and those now lost. I spoke about pain I’d experienced in relationships with those very close to me – my parents, my wider family, my closest female friend. Every week, without fail, I came away with the feeling that my being here, in this world still, mattered. That keeping me here, in it, was a thing worth time and care.

  Every step of the way, no matter how much I lashed out at him, M continued to love and care for me – this person whom he’d known for so short a time, and who had treated him like an enemy for much of it. There is a chance that during that first year in Derry, when I attended therapy and counselling every week, I hit my lowest point, but it’s a bit difficult to recall the actual chronology. It could just as easily have been the year that followed, which was almost as harrowing as the first. Trauma does that. It takes the truth and distorts it, it jumbles up the timeline, it hides things away for innumerable days. Alcohol does these things too.

  I cannot remember many specific details of my first two years back in Ireland; they all swim together into a sense of a life being formed for the very first time. People came and went, as they always do. Slowly, I lashed out a little less at the person who nurtured and cared for me. I formed a handful of relationships with people I trusted enough to be around but not enough to talk to about my mental health. I started to run again, and I learned to stop when I needed to, instead of pushing my body too hard. M and I found that we worked together incredibly well outside our house, and we put our energy and time into a vegan café and arts space, first in an old shirt factory, then in a building built into the historic Derry Walls. The café was the only place where you could sit with a coffee, reading, writing or simply just being, beside the city’s walls. Those walls that once divided that city of oaks, that were the source of such devastating bloodshed and loss. The café was the first building as you left the Bogside and entered through the walls into the city’s heart. Something about choosing that particular building as the one we would bring back to life – the one where we would offer free food to those in need, safe places to share writing, performance, and hold meetings about the environment, a space to discuss the earth and the parts we might play in our community – changed me in ways I am still only beginning to understand. Only a few weeks after we opened riots started again. Bombs were being made again, cars were being burned again, police were being targeted again, and the local community organised a vigil. It was held at the top of Fahan Street – the street leading up from the Free Derry Wall, the nucleus of the fighting – right in front of our new business. For almost a week in the run-up to the community meeting, young lads had been jumping off the Derry Walls onto the flat roof of our café and throwing bottles and rocks in their angry, confused rioting. That evening, we stood together, people from both sides of the river, Catholics, Protestants and those of us who are sick of those divisions, and tried to find a way to reach the members of our community who were so full of anger and fear. Who could see no future for themselves in that city, and didn’t know any other way to act. I cried my heart out –
partly because of fear for what the future held for Derry, but mostly because of the light that had come, all out of nowhere, a light that I had never seen on people’s faces before that night. People who years ago might have not only condoned the violence but encouraged it were now standing shoulder to shoulder with people from the other side of the river, emboldened and courageous, ready to fight for a different future – this time with hope, not fear. Something shifted then. I stood tall and hopeful too, fiercely proud of the place I came from, and of all that it had become – of all that it had the potential to grow into, still.

  Early into our relationship, just months after I’d moved in, M made a very important decision to start driving again. He’d been without a vehicle for years at that point following a traumatising experience that left him too scared to get behind the wheel. I don’t drive, and public transport in rural Ireland is expensive, infrequent and unreliable. M felt that getting out to the wilds of Ireland was a very important thing for me, for my healing and for our relationship. So we bought an old beat-up green Mercedes. I watched as the man I loved faced his fears with each short trip, building up confidence and rekindling a love of driving he thought was gone for ever, to bring me to places he knew I really needed to be. I could once again bring myself into the safekeeping of the land around me, as I had done everywhere else I’d lived. I let it hold me close. I let it carve out space inside me for healing. We explored every last bit of Donegal – so many wee nooks and hidden coves neither of us had ever seen before, stretches of shoreline as if from another time, hills full of ancient stones and untold stories – over and over the land kept me safe. When our car broke, we bought a van, allowing us to sleep on a mattress in the back at any place we found for the night. Soon we went further, in every direction – north, south, east, west – to places we returned to over and over, and to places that we never once went back to. We found a sheep’s skull at the wee beach beneath Fort Dunree one wet, misty January day – nearing the end of my therapy – and both saw it for the gift that it was: a marker of that day. We set off to find a particular harbour I remembered from childhood that never turned up, and in its place we found the most ethereal, misty bay we’d ever seen. There were harrowing days, and haunting days, and days so full of hope and light that I howled like a wolf.