Thin Places

by Kerri ni Dochartaigh

  M gave me the space and solitude I needed but often I wanted him to stay – to be there in the places I was craving, too – silently, by my side. It was the first time I’d ever welcomed the company of another person in my space at times of grief and confusion. There was swimming, so much swimming, and there were feathers and stones almost everywhere I looked. There was still pain and trauma, and for some time there was still a deep-rooted addiction and, when it went, a whole new layer of trauma was unearthed. Once those first two years had passed, though, I never tried to give my life over to anything unsafe again. To any place, thing, person or thought that would place me in any real danger. Something shifted, something vast, and it never came back.

  In the third year back, on the first of January 2019, at the age of thirty-five, after awakening on my first New Year’s Day as a non-drinker, I was heralded into my first swim of the year in the Atlantic Ocean by a curfew of curlew at Shroove Lighthouse. Just past was the first Christmas and the first birthday I have ever had in which I did not shed a single tear. That bird of grief, the one I met in my childhood bedroom, thick with smoke and unimaginable sorrow, did not take his place at my table that December, even though I had made proper room for him this year for the very first time. In that third year back in Derry, I had – silently, without any marking of it – made room to sit with my grief. I had stopped lashing out at M; my angry, violent outbursts had gone away completely, and a year had passed free from any thoughts of suicide for the first time in over a decade. The night before, on New Year’s Eve 2018, my dad had sat by my fire, opposite me, the first fire he had ever watched me light with my own hands.

  When he arrived I was drawing a wren. We talked about the collective terms for birds. We talked about the coastline of Donegal, of our experiences there – mostly separate from one another – and I told him about a day on which I had been followed by a wild red fox to the cove at Kinnagoe Bay. Midnight came and passed us by, gently and without the sense of any deep undoing or reshaping, leaving no trace of that huge transformation we assume such moments will carry in their wake. When he left, just before one a.m., I realised it was the first New Year of my entire life that I had watched an old year become a new one with my dad.

  The next day, as I swam beneath curlews, I thought about the first time I heard the cry of a curlew in the company of another human. It was on Inch Island that first year I moved back, while walking with my dad through tall reeds under a beautiful winter sky filled with starlings. Less than a minute after the curlew broke that December silence, he told me, for the first time, that he had almost drowned when he was eighteen after being caught up in reeds beside a swan’s nest. He never explained why he chose that particular moment to share such a traumatising part of the story of his life, a life that I knew very little about. To this day I believe that the thing that swept away decades of distance, and which caught my dad so offguard, which made him so honest and brave, was that curlew’s cry in the soft, pink December sky. The three of us were held in one of the thinnest places I have ever set foot, in the space in between.

  By the time my father and I had reached the water’s edge, where our bodies met the outline of the world, where the waves met the land, another borderline had been wiped off the map.

  I’ve spent much time recently trying to place all of my experiences in Derry into some form of a pattern. In truth, though, lots of it feels jumbled and hazy – a reflection of what I lived through there over all the decades that came before. Ghosts and fragments, reflections and mud, and then the unmapped, unknown point of the map – where light began to fill in the gaps left over.

  Two years after I moved home, in 2017, in the April after the UK voted to leave the EU, I had a piece of artwork on display in an exhibition entitled Border alongside twenty-three other female artists at the Void Gallery in Derry. We first met to begin work on the Border project on the first day of February. St Brigid is said to have called wild birds to her hand, and in rough weather she sent them to guide sailors to safety. My favourite St Brigid story is of her teaching the oystercatcher to build his nest above the line that the sea leaves behind in its wake to save his young from the fierce storms of winter. From the meeting room where we sat at that first gathering we could see where Clinton had stood in Guildhall Square, so many moons before. We could see the Peace Bridge, and the striking River Foyle. The following morning, a young lad in his early twenties put himself into that river, gave himself to that body of water we had looked out on and spoken of in such depth the night before – that border between the visible and the invisible. There were rumours that the place he had chosen to go in was in the part where the city becomes a boggy estuary, the part of the river I had been drawn to over and over for the first few years. For the entirety of our project, folk from both sides of that river – Protestant and Catholic, political and apolitical – trudged through deep mud, along dark black tracks, underneath a sky filled with varying stages of a new moon, the first of that spring. The whole of Derry-Doire-Londonderry came out together, side by side, to try to claim back a son that the entire city had lost to the hungry river.

  During my research for the Border project I was touched by the discovery of the closeness in meaning of the words mneme and neomenia. The first noun translates as ‘the ability to retain a memory of the past experiences, patterns of behaviour or cultural practices or ideas of its own and past generations and to transmit these to future generations’. (Mneme, from Greek mythology, was the muse of memory.)

  Neomenia translates as ‘the time of the new moon; the beginning of a month in a lunar calendar’. I began to think about the moon, and the possible effects it might have on us all, and on me as a woman. I thought about the effects it might have on our river, and on our memory, both individual and collective. What effect does living by a body of water have on us? What about the effects of our past? What about when we leave a place, the place where we were born? When it all becomes too much? When the river feels like the only place that might be able to hold all of our grief, our bodies coated with shame? Why are so many of us coming home, now? Is it possible that we are being called back, just when we are needed on this island the most? Just when we need the island, ourselves, to make a place inside us to heal.

  We hung our work for the Border project on 21 March – the first full day of spring in 2017, following the vernal equinox of the previous day. I awoke that day in a room full of soft yellow-grey light, filtering in through white muslin. That morning snow fell thick and fast – grey as fresh ash against that window of my attic room overlooking the Peace Bridge. The news reached me that Martin McGuinness – a man so deeply embedded in the beating and bruised heart of my city – had passed away. I was caught utterly off guard, as gusts of wind blew the white dust all around the rooftops. There is a terrifying violence to the past of my hometown, like those of many others’, but in that moment I felt fiercely grateful for the handful of people who chose, finally, to undo their own chains when they did. For the fact that, somehow, after decades of violence, they allowed themselves to meet on the middle ground despite their crow-black past. For the fact that people who had once planted bombs somehow found a way to plant seeds – seeds of peace – side by side in a city begging on its hand and knees for reconciliation. A city desperate for tall, strong, healing oak trees to be allowed to grow in its soil once more.

  In between the hanging of our exhibition and its opening night, Martin McGuinness, a man held in contempt by many but who in later life turned his back on his violent past and played an incomparable role in forging a pathway towards peace in the city of Derry, was buried. Snow swirled outside that morning, and M brought me a coffee to drink, looking out over the rooftops of our city. I glanced at that river, the Peace Bridge and Guildhall Square, where I first heard words of peace that stayed with me for ever, and every single bit of it filled me with grateful tears. That afternoon at the funeral, I listened to the words of Bill Clinton once more, this time in a very differently mapped c
ity from the one I had stood in as a terrified eleven-year-old girl, in the square below my window.

  At McGuinness’s funeral, Clinton spoke of the journey that we as a city and island have come on throughout our Peace Process – one that was navigated through choppy, stormy and uncertain waters. He recounted walking across the Peace Bridge with McGuinness and John Hume – and spoke of what he considered to be McGuinness’s utter metamorphosis – from a man of violence to a man of peace.

  Clinton once again ended with Heaney:

  Believe me – when the people who made this peace did it, every single one of them decided to take a flying leap into the unknown against their better judgement.

  One hour before we opened our exhibition to the public, a body taken out of the River Foyle was confirmed to be that of the young lad that the city of Derry had searched for together, side by side. Later that morning I watched a solitary heron fly low, directly above the votive candles that had been kept lit throughout the search, on the Protestant side of the Peace Bridge where the young lad came from, by members of the Catholic community from the other side.

  When I moved back here, after a decade and a half spent away from the place I was born, there was no way that any of us could have foretold the changes that would land on this city, like a bird shot down from the sky above that vast, deep river. That Brexit vote, in the year that I moved home, felt too surreal to really sink in. Even now, I wonder if I would have done anything differently in that spring of 2016 – if I’d known that all of this would happen. If I’d known that I would watch the city begin to sink back down into thick, dark mud. If I’d known that murder would be back on our lips again, helicopters back in our night skies, mourning back in our hearts, fear back in the pits of our bellies. I wonder what I would have done. I wonder if I would have been brave enough to come back here, to this shifting, turning, cracking city. I wonder if it would have been the same path I would have trodden; I wonder if I would be at this point of the line now, at this point of the circle. Would I have guessed, too, the things I would go through here in those years, the changes that would enter into my life, the peace that I would, somehow, finally feel, in beside my bones?

  Those candles were still lit that morning after the young lad’s body had been found at the edge-land of the city, given back by the hungry river, their lights flickering in the soft glow of morning in memory of him. I felt a change in the air back then in that city of mine, despite the chaos and uncertainty that Brexit is blowing in on stormy winds. I could hear the beat of something stronger – much, much stronger – in the morning’s breeze.

  •

  There are places that are so thin that we see right through it all, through the untruths we have told ourselves about who we are. We see through every last bit of the things that we once thought defined us. We see that, like a landscape that has undergone vast and irreversible shifts, we, too, might be capable of change.

  We see that there might, in fact, be something a little like grace to an object that has been battered and undone, hewn away to less than it once was, chiselled and broken, sculpted and reworked into something so different from its original form.

  We see that we, too, might learn to live in a different way – within a changed and changing form. New, whittled lines alongside the old, healed cracks.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Skull of a Shae

  THE ISLAND ON WHICH I was born is a wild, ancient and stirring place – a place so ethereal as to take a given moment in time and bathe it in the light of something divine, a place that was eternal and holy long before those words ever had need for voicing.

  It is a changeable and changing place. You will not leave my island the same person you were when you first found your way to her shores. Ireland is somewhere that burrows deep down, in beside the parts of you built of bone and of marrow, before you even know that you have arrived – before you even embark, perhaps. It has been painted as a lush island – the colour green spilling out of every corner – but those of us who call it home would tell you a different story. Ireland is an island bathed in colours the like of which I can never properly fathom, more than three decades since I arrived on her shores.

  She is the yellow of the lichen that covers ancient rocks – set in circles – that protect the surface of hidden and sacred gathering places.

  She is the grey – so many greys – that records the passing of days, of years, of millennia, stones that speak of time, and of all that cannot really ever be kept in any one place.

  She is blue – a blue that I have never really seen in any other place on earth – each of her bodies of water seems to embody a different shade of blue from the others. The river that flows through my hometown is, betimes, the most flawless blue I have ever set eyes upon – inky, fading into cyan and, in some lights, royal, even delft in others. But that river of mine is also a shape-shifter; it holds too many colours inside its belly to even begin to list. When the autumn settles in along its reed-fringed verges, my river seems as though it is almost the brown of the muck and sediment – as if the silt has made its way up from the unfathomable depths beneath to greet the wind as it rustles through the timeworn oaks above.

  Ireland – this ethereal and mythical island, set down in the heart of the ravenous, tumultuous Atlantic Ocean – is black, too, coal-black, as black as to be the making of the crows. Black is the colour of many of our true loves’ hairs on this island but it is also the colour of sorrow and fear – of mystery and the unknown, of so much death, and of the unimaginable depths of our grief.

  •

  I have been back on this island of many colours for three and a half years, now. Here I am, living a stone’s throw from the geographical spaces that heaped the most trauma onto my path. The natural world in the wilderness on both sides of that unseen border dragged me back to the land of the living, and it held me there. In childhood, it was the compass that guided me through an unnavigable body of water created by the Troubles that battered Ireland. In adulthood, it has held me just as tightly, as I dealt with the trauma that had rained down on me for decades, in the wake the Troubles had left behind them. Every bird – goldfinch, whooper swan, oystercatcher, corncrake, white lady peacock, curlew – held the promise of an escape from the present moment, a new path of flight. Every butterfly and moth – tortoiseshell, peacock, cinnabar, copper, speckled wood – spoke of hope and the potential for unrecognisable change. That change so many of us had hoped for came to this island, but now all of the solid, irreplaceable progress made in the last years is at risk of being lost, along with so many other precious things that are under threat in our world right now. It is our duty, all of us, to use our voices, to tell those who are dragging us down into the darkest reaches: we are not ready for this, enough, already, enough.

  This story, like all stories of all people and places, has more layers than I may ever fully know, than I could even try to peel back, but I am trying. I will always try to understand this story – my story, our story. The violence, bloodshed and trauma that crossed my path within less than a mile of this street I now live on are a part of my past that I can never undo. They are a part of this city’s history, this island’s, and the world’s too; these events speak to – and of – our race.

  Much, so much, has been lost; so much that we once held close here is gone, and that loss is another thing that cannot be undone; those things cannot be hauled back out from the thick tar-dark bog-land of the past. There is, though, underneath the darkening sky – beneath the layer of fear that politics, poverty and anxiety have scarred the moment with – so much to be found; glints of light shine up from the mud, like gold teeth in an old, wise mouth.

  Outside, as the months of 2019 have passed by, fierce winds have ripped through this land. The political uncertainty and darkness began, in the last year or so, to feel as though it was actually becoming a visible, fixed layer of the actual landscape of the North itself. On we who were there in that landscape, just trying to stay calm, jus
t trying to find the strength to shout about things like hope. A moment came, at the start of this year, when things felt as if they had reached rock bottom. When I look back over 2019 it is a wee girl that I see, not a grown woman. A wee girl who is terrified that the darkness of the past might come back – of a cruel, ebony crow coming back to hide away all the light.

  That crow I met when my home was bombed in the dead of a Derry night held me tightly in his silent grip for decades. At the beginning he was bigger than life itself, holding the optical illusion of the world in his strong beak. For the first time since I moved back to Ireland, there have been days in this dark year, just on its way out, when my crow has had the strongest silhouette in my life so far, when he has had the vastest, blackest wings. There have been days – so many days – this year when I could see the little girl I was way back on that deprived, violent housing estate – and to some extent, still am. I am not ready to go back there; I have worked too hard just to keep myself upright – to keep my eyes looking to the sky, looking for the beat and light of life. I battle – I really try to – the sense of being dragged up, away – I try to ignore the calling away that the sorrow always brings.