by Orna Ross
Hint hint, Rory. Over to you.
When Maeve arrived fifteen minutes ago, I'd been typing out documents. A letter to Peg from her friend Molly, a letter to Norah from Peg that was never sent, and an election leaflet that seems poignant to me, that seems to carry in it all the yearning that my grandmother passed down the years.
* * *
Dear Voter,
We were told the Treaty with the British Empire would bring peace. If so, what is WAR?
We were told it would bring freedom. What, then, is SLAVERY?
We were told it would bring order. Then what is CHAOS?
They said this Treaty would fill Irish pockets. It has filled only Irish PRISONS and GRAVES. If the British Government is going to keep fighting and destroying us, we prefer that she should use her own English troops — as she does in the North of Ireland — and not our own misguided pretend-politicians.
People of Ireland, come back to us. Our country's future is now in your hands.
A REPUBLIC is the only basis on which we can build a proud and prosperous national life. Use this coming election to vote NO to this terrible Treaty. Then we can ALL share TOGETHER in the final victory over the British Empire.
Come back to us.
Vote for those who will yet SAVE THE NATION.
Vote Anti-Treaty.
* * *
It gets me every time, this leaflet put together by my grandmother and great-grandmother. It's those words: "Come back to us." Come Back.
People don't, do they?
We can't.
That's what I was trying to say to Rory, in my letter. Trying to reclaim what we had, to start over, to get it right this time, wasn't possible. No matter how much we wished it was.
So why am I still here?
"So tell me," Maeve asks, echoing my thoughts. "Why are you still down here? What have you been doing with yourself?"
"You saw that heap of papers in there. Reading and writing, mostly. Lying low."
"Is there anything of interest in those papers of Mammy's? Are they all rubbish?"
"Oh, no, they're not rubbish."
"Really? Tell me."
"I think you better wait until I've put it together."
She sits up, intrigued by something in my voice. "What on earth have you found?"
"All sorts of things."
"Deep dark secrets?" she grins.
"Yes, as a matter of fact."
"Things Mammy didn't tell us?"
"You're forgetting, Maeve, Mrs D. never told me anything."
That stops her smile. "Oh no, Jo, you're not going to write something Mammy wouldn't want known? Please tell me you're not."
I spread my hands and examine my fingernails.
"Jo!"
Above us a gull screams, slides across the air towards the sea. How much did Mrs D. know? That is the question. In her letter, she said she didn't read Norah's "scribblings" or all of Gran's diaries. I have read everything now, some of them many times, and still I'm not certain. Sometimes I find one thing in their words, especially Norah's. Sometimes another.
But what I hear in almost every sentence is the sound of their words shrinking from what they're saying, even as they say it. That's what speaks loudest to me across the years.
Maeve is annoyed with me again. "It's not your story, Jo, to do what you like with."
"Hey, calm down. I'll tell you in a while."
She looks sceptical.
"I will, Maeve, I promise. I just want to get it straight myself first."
"So you're not going against Mammy's wishes?"
I shrug. "Nothing I write can hurt her now. And if she really didn't want me to know — or write — about something, all she had to do was take it out of the suitcase."
"Maybe she wanted you — us — to know, but not the whole goddamn world."
I shake my head, though she's right, of course. That's possible.
Maeve takes off her sunglasses, blinks at me in the sunshine. "Jo, if you publish something she wouldn't like just to settle some score of your own, you'll be sorry later."
I don't think that's what I'm doing. I think I want to tell my family's story because if a story is to be told, it must be told as whole as we can tell it, not picking and choosing the bits that make us look good, as Mrs D. liked to do.
If I am to make anything meaningful of my life — and what else has this whole strange summer been about, if not that? — then I cannot let myself add one more drop to my family's unfathomable well of silence.
I know Maeve will never allow me all that, so I shrug and say instead, "There is no score."
She blinks even harder at this. I see her trying to calm herself, trying to find tactful, persuasive words to convince me. Just at that moment, you ripple inside me, then settle, like you are snuggling down.
I put my hand to where I feel you. Maeve notes the movement and, despite herself, smiles an indulgent smile. "Where are you going to have it?"
"I don't know."
"What does your doctor say?"
"I haven't seen a doctor."
"What? You're...how many months pregnant?"
"About six."
"Six months pregnant and you haven't seen a doctor?"
Here we go. I close my eyes, take a breath, wait for the next onslaught.
"That's just downright irresponsible."
This is why I haven't told her. Do all big sisters think they have this right to reprimand like this? It seems we don't have a single safe place to rest, Maeve and I, no matter how hard we both try.
"I'm sorry, Jo, but that's what it is."
"Correct me if I'm wrong, Maeve, but I thought this was my pregnancy?"
"When you're pregnant, Jo, you have more than yourself to consider."
"Yeah, well, I don't happen to think pregnancy is an illness. And I don't see why I need some doctor I've never met before to tell me I'm fine. I know I'm fine."
"But at your age especially..."
"Is this why you came, Maeve? To deliver a series of sermons?"
That works. "Oh God." She sighs and sags, like a pricked balloon. "How do you do this to me, Jo? Coming down in the car, I swore I wasn't going to criticise no matter what I found. But I never ever expected to find...this."
She's right, she can't help it any more than I can. Here we are, thirty-eight and forty years old, and as testy with each other as ever. We'll always be the same. The best time we ever had together was when she visited me in San Francisco, when we were on my territory, but here in Ireland, I'm her inadequate little sister again. Here, she'll always take liberties.
I try to appease her. "As a matter of fact, I am going to see a doctor soon."
"I'm glad," she says, trying to match my conciliatory tone. "Do."
"I will, I will."
I lie back, close my eyes to the sun. Should I tell her about Rory? What would I say?
That two days ago, I came out here, the day's work not so much done as abandoned for the evening, and found him sitting, his back to the shed, looking out to sea, waiting. He'd heard that I hadn't left after all and had come straight to me.
I knew that moment of seeing him there was one of the most important in our whole relationship. As important as the day when we were two children first spying each other across the village divide that separated our relatives. As important as the first time we spoke to each other properly, at a wedding, under the noses of our people. As important as the first night we slept together, twenty years ago, in his flat in Dublin. And yes, as important as the night soon after when I told him we were pregnant, and he responded so inadequately.
I hovered in the doorway of my shed, afraid to go forward. What would I say? Tell him to leave, to go back to his wife? Ask him to...Well, it doesn't matter now what I thought or considered saying, because all I did was go across and slip into sitting beside him.
We sat together for a long, long time, quietly watching the waves, afraid to speak. And ever since, it's been just as it was before, with
him coming round each evening at sundown and us sitting, late into the night, talking, talking, talking.
It can't go on, I know. It has to stop, and soon.
While I'm trying to find words that might be able to explain some of this to my sister, she says, "You said 'her'? The baby's a girl?"
"That's how I find myself thinking. Of 'she', of 'her'."
"So you don't know for sure?"
"No, how could I? But right from the start, I've had the feeling it's going to be a girl."
And it's true. "She," "her": these are the words I used when talking about you to my sister — or to Hilde or Rory — but most of the time we're not with others. Most of the time we're alone together and the word I use is "you".
You are changing me, making more of me: swelling my breasts and my girth, expanding my heart and my lungs, ripening and plumping my genitals, filling and darkening my nipples, increasing the volume of my blood.
You have splashed my skin with colour, drawn a bold line of brown down my belly. Greased and furry, somersaulting and thumb-sucking inside me, getting firmer in the world: you rely on me. Soon you will be what they call viable, able to breathe on your own.
Still I can see how you will draw on me, body, heart and soul, for the rest of my days. For the first time, I see how a mother birthed every bird and animal and person on the planet. Everything, everywhere, has been mothered into being: how had I never noticed that before? I think of all the churches holding up their God the Fathers, the men who have insisted that children carry their names through the generations and, instead of my usual anger, I feel pity.
You've unpicked the me I used to be. I am going to join the band of mothers, those people who let themselves fade in the light of their offspring, those people — like my sister — that I used to slightly disdain. Now, as I sit here with her, as I look back up the tunnel of time at our mother's life, and our grandmother's, and our great-grandmother's, what I disdain is that earlier, unknowing me.
"Did you know this place used to be called Bastardstown?" I ask Maeve.
This was a secret of Coolanagh sands that I came across while doing library research. Coolanagh, Mucknamore, Inisheen: these names for our village, and the topography around it, came from the Irish language, but outsiders gave the area this different, ugly, English name, because it was famous as the place to go if you had a baby you didn't want, or were unable, to keep.
Infanticide. Thanks to its unique play of sands and tides, Coolanagh was where reluctant mothers came, according to legend — truth's abiding sister — to do their agonizing deed.
The book I read about it was schlock. It told its grisly stories, some of them going back centuries, without pausing once to consider the lives of those women, of why they were unable to rise to the demands of motherhood. To the man who wrote it — M.K. Trevalyan — they were ciphers, travesties of pure-and-holy womanhood: mad, bad and murderous.
Maeve shivers. "Bastardstown. God, I haven't heard it called that in years."
But she doesn't want to talk about that. While she embarks upon another long stream of sisterly advice, I look out to Coolanagh. It looks so innocent out there, on yet another beautiful summer day. The tide is so far out that the sands stretch almost as far as the island.
What age was I when Gran first brought me out that causeway to tell me her story about these sands having swallowed an entire town? The height of her hip, anyway. Auntie Norah was with us and the three of us stood on the tallest dune and I felt like we were on the high deck of a ship, sailing through an ocean of sand.
Gran's palm was rough, I remember, like the skin on a rock, but hers was the hand I most loved to hold. I can feel the damp of her swimming costume against my cheek as I leaned my face against it. Beneath the fabric was her soft old flesh and underneath that again, her tough hip bone.
She pointed in a diagonal from where we stood, towards the island.
"Look across now at that stretch of sand," she said to me. "There behind the barbed wire. Tell me what you see."
Hearing this, Auntie Norah took a few steps away from us. Gran looked back but, unusually, didn't follow. Instead, she pulled me in closer, gripped me tighter. "Do you notice anything strange about what you're seeing?" she asked again. "Come on, pet. Look a little harder."
I stretched my eyes for her.
"Can't you make out that double row of sand-hills near the edge and that long, straight dip running in between?"
All I could see was an undulating blanket of sand that looked flatter and flatter the further away you looked. The tide was way out that day, just as it is now.
"I wish we could walk across to it," Gran said. "If we could walk the length of it, you'd feel what I'm saying to you."
But we couldn't walk across Coolanagh sands. Young as I was, I already knew that.
"What would you say if I told you that what you're looking at is the rooftops of a sunken town?"
I turned my face up to hers, tried to read it.
"Yes, a sunken town. Under those bumps there, the ones that are so regular, all in a row. See? That's from the houses down below. And across there...that dip between them — " she pulled my hand up, pointed my finger — "that's the long main street."
She began to talk in her story voice. "Fadó, fadó – a long time ago – a big town stood on that spot I'm showing to you now. A city it was called, though smaller in them days than any of our cities now, but with its own charter to prove it. It was one of the largest sea ports in all of Ireland, and so rich that it used to send not one, but two, Members of Parliament to the government in London. I'm talking hundreds of years ago now, not long after the English first came to Ireland.
"What the poor people who lived in this city didn't know was that their town was built on sinking sand. From the first day those buildings went up, the sands were sucking at them — slowly, slowly drawing them down. So slowly that at first they didn't notice, but day by day it went on, until they came to know what was happening and to realise that they'd all have to leave.
"So they did. Still the city kept on sinking, until nothing was left of it above the ground only those bumps and hollows that you see before you."
At that, Auntie Norah, who must have been listening behind us, made an explosive sound, something like the harrumph of a horse. She started to walk away, back along the causeway towards home.
Let her go, the inside of my head pleaded to Gran, but already we were turning after her. "It's all right, Norah," Gran called. "Wait now, don't be going on." We broke into a run, my arm pulled along, Gran calling after her back: "Ah, Norah, where's the harm in a bit of an old yarn?"
In the library, researching facts about quicksand, I was astounded to learn that Gran was right. There was once a bustling seaport town on this spot, five centuries ago. And it was sand that caused its demise. The inlet silted up and couldn't be navigated and that was the end of the trade on which the town depended. It declined and died and, eventually, disappeared. All of it, every building, into complete oblivion, until there was almost no trace of evidence that it ever existed.
Everything else she told me about Coolanagh, though, was wrong. Quicksand does not suck, it is not bottomless, it does not have a life of its own. It is a phenomenon, not a substance; any sand can become "quick" given the right conditions.
On Coolanagh, those conditions are a stream flowing off the island onto the sands, the stream in which I once pretended to see fairies to please a bunch of mean Mucknamore schoolgirls. That, and a layer of rock underlying the sand that slows drainage, keeps the sand grains in permanent liquid suspension.
As to the danger, the books I read were divided. One said it was impossible for an upright human to sink below the surface of such sand. The density of human body mass is less than that of any sand–water suspension and so they'd never get down far enough.
Yet people have died on Coolanagh. On the island, there's a cross which commemorates three people — a man and two women, who died out there in 1879 —
as well as "all who fell victim to these sands". And there was Dan, of course, in 1923, the real source of my enquiry. They would have died, this book claimed, through trying to escape. It was their wriggling and writhing that would have pulled them face down into suffocation.
Another book disagreed. It held that a human body falling into deep quicksand behaves as it would on falling into deep water, plunging down below the surface then rising back up again. Except in quicksand, the higher density elongates the down-and-backup motion, so that the lungs run out of breath before the body re-emerges from the depths.
On the tidal sands of Coolanagh, there was a third possibility: the sea. A victim who survived an initial immersion in sand, who succeeded in re sisting the urge to struggle, would remain stuck in the sand until the arrival of help, or the return of the next tide. Whichever came soonest.
Since reading that book on Bastardstown, my head is full of lonely women and their lost babies, and thinking again of them now, it comes to me. That's why I'm still here.
As Maeve and I run out of conversation, as we get up and she prepares to leave, I'm only half with her. Talking to her about you has brought it all together.
I see it now. I'm being held here by the loss that Rory and I never discussed.
He and I were doomed before we got started: we knew it back then and the family papers have shown me why. But none of that excuses how we behaved. Or accounts for what we ourselves destroyed, what we added to the loss. And the shame. And the silence.
We've talked about everything else, he and I. Everything I've discovered about his family and mine. All the events of our lives since we met and before. Everything, except how we came to fail each other so very badly that I ended up taking that boat to London, without him.
1923
Knock, knock, knock! Knock, knock, knock!
The sound had been going on for a while, Peg realised, as her sleeping ears woke to it. As it sank in that what she was hearing was somebody banging on the front door, like they were trying to rouse the entire county, she heard a voice calling. Her mother's, calling from across the hallway, from what used to be Barney's room, querulous in her weakness. “Peg? JJ? Peg?"