Inventory

by Darran Anderson

  Boom Hall had been the site of Charles Fort, which guarded the boom, bloodily and ultimately unsuccessfully, during the Siege. Both sides of the boom were defended, and there were so many hostilities there that it was fearfully referred to as “Gunsland.” The mansion had been the home of earls, bishops, businessmen—its ownership charting the changing fortunes and character of the establishment. During the war it was occupied by the women’s corps of the Royal Naval Service. It was gutted by accidental fire in 1970 and left to ruin. I walked right around it, but all the entries were blocked up. As boys, we used to get in under the steps of the main entrance, down in a small moat where the servants would presumably have arrived. We’d scurry about on the rubble inside, trying to climb up on fallen broken masonry like loose scree, to where the second and third floors had been. What were once luxurious rooms were just empty cubits of air above us. We couldn’t be seen from outside, but it was risky too, as there was only one way out if someone followed us in. I had never entirely felt at ease there.

  Shortly before the mansion burned down, it had been abandoned. A group of Travellers, it is said, relieved the building of its remaining valuables, including furniture and food. Before they carted them away, they laid out a long table with an impromptu banquet and ate and drank merrily—the last of a long line of the great and good to do so.

  The storm was gathering force and I knew I’d have to find shelter soon. It was coming in on the leeward tide. Waves snarling at the sky. An uneasy truce broken. I moved deeper into the trees. On the edge there were already bluebells, wood sorrel, bracken, bog asphodel. Signs of partially swamped land, I knew that much. What once grew here was recorded in old almanacs. I found something resembling a hollow that still had a bed of golden-brown leaves. It seemed to offer some semblance of shelter, but as I walked in, there was a chorus from above, like an aviary alarm system, and suddenly dozens of crows took noisy flight, stripping the branches bare, save for their empty nests. Birds burst from trees like piles of leaves kicked in autumn. The birdsong of spring—trill, warble, peep, chirrup, whistle—reduced to a harsh caw, breaking the promise of silence. The sky was a delta of light framed by the trees. The canopy swaying. I remembered hearing somewhere that the willow bends in a storm while the strong oak breaks. The rain broke through the trees. Another word came into my mind as I leaned against the bark—petrichor, the scent of the rain after a dry period.

  What intrigued humans about the woods was that which once repelled us. They were uneasy places on the periphery of settlements, full of potential dangers. You once went there by necessity, not choice. They were fearful places of transformation. Where the branches would suddenly turn into creatures, and where unseen things could be heard in the undergrowth. Fit only for those seeking refuge or foraging. Bandits, hermits, and would-be saints. They were places you could almost imagine being sentient, the way a single step would set off a shudder through the entire environment, a chorus of disapproval having detected your trespass, the animal that scares the other animals away. It knew you were there. In stories, from those of Baba Yaga to the Brothers Grimm, people tried to personify this, but it was beyond human. Its thinking was not ours.

  The weather suddenly worsened into a black squall. Deep churning clouds, black with the weight of water directly overhead. Before he went into exile for starting a bloody war with another local saint over a plagiarized book (the land of saints and scholars was by no means an innately positive thing), Columba had once said a prayer—a spell really—that no one be “shattered” by lightning in Derry, and I hoped if there was a god, he’d been listening. The downpour came through the trees like the sea’s roar. I could just about hear the thudding of a gate somewhere, wrenched almost off its hinges. I knew I’d have to make a break for it, the trees offering scant shelter. The muddy path, strewn with slugs, was an oil spill.

  I was soaked right through by the time I made it under the bridge. On both sides were walls of water, the feeling of being behind a waterfall. This was once our base. The brutalist viaduct was still covered in a kaleidoscope of graffiti, but innumerable layers had been added since I’d last been there. I pulled myself up onto the ledge and leaned into the corner, trying to keep the wind off. Next to me was a door to the passageway that ran the entire length of the interior of the bridge; pipes ran along the underside of the bridge. I felt a vague sense of vertigo, only now appreciating how high up I was, and how high we’d been up here larking around as teenagers. It struck me as insane that we used to get wasted up here, with the steep staircase below, but the danger simply hadn’t occurred to us then. I tried warming my hands by cupping my breath in them. They had a purple tinge, like an old boxer’s. The bridge curved in mid-air and turned, sweeping down to land on the other side. It was held aloft by vast pillars, some on dry land and others on small man-made and uninhabited islands filled with trees. Archways for boats passing underneath them. The kid had vanished from the bridge I was now huddled under.

  The downpour was coming in waves now. The scent of nettles in the rain. Given that the rain was coming sideways, I decided to make a dash for the edge of the woods, where there might be more shelter. I almost slipped once or twice on the fresh mud, but made it.

  We were always finding little copses as children to hide within, to exercise the subversion of invisibility, having access to a world adults could not enter. One was in the grounds of a psychiatric institution on our way home from school. We’d crawl through a tunnel someone had made and emerge in a perfect hollow. There were markings on the trees, unidentifiable names and dates carved and the ruins of a tree house, left by others who had since grown up. Relics of the childhood of others. All the trees were laid waste by winter. A gaunt, starved landscape, tied to seasons that the cities tried to ignore. Spring would come and summer; the empty arc of branches would turn into cathedrals of green. The entire planet had to shift first. In earlier minds, there must have lurked the fear this winter would not end, nor even this night.

  The trees creaked in the wind. I thought of the sounds of the sea. The groans of the Endurance being slowly crushed by pack ice. Tapping in Morse code on the hull of the Kursk. Sounds of pressure.

  I pushed deeper into the woods, toward the river, going over the litany of trees like it was an incantation, taking my mind off the cold—wych elm, silver birch, ash.

  Deep within the Inferno, Dante finds a wood. It has no clear path and seems in perpetual winter. The leaves are not green, the branches are not smooth but tortured and twisted, the fruits are thorny and poisonous. Tormenting harpies nest there. He hears wailing but cannot place it. He breaks off a stick from a thorn bush, which begins to bleed and then replies, startling him, “Why did you break me?” The very trees are the souls of the damned, the suicides, the “self-murderers.”

  Whatever pity there was in Dante the traveler’s account, Dante the theologian placed suicides in the Seventh Circle, the circle of violence. The Church was marginally more merciful. It merely sent the victims/perpetrators of suicide to limbo, alongside those who had lived before Christ and the souls of unbaptized children. It was one of the ways the priests kept the congregation in line. Hell was too extravagant to be real, but limbo seemed believable. A place of no torment, but no pleasure and no hope. It was even said that the entrance to limbo lay not far from us, in a tunnel once visited by St. Patrick, on Lough Derg.

  In the past the authorities, civil and religious, exacted a heavy price for acts of suicide on the loved ones who remained. It was illegal, being seen as a way of escaping debt or defying God’s omnipotence; and therefore, it was reasoned, anyone surviving an attempt, or even the bereaved family, should be punished. The Church tried to portray suicide as an English import and innately un-Irish, while simultaneously operating the death cult of Christ and the saints. But the taboo was not just a Catholic one; the Protestant Book of Common Prayer contained the Order for the Burial of the Dead, “not to be used for any that die unbaptized, or excommunicate, or have laid violent hand
s upon themselves.”

  The people I knew who had taken their own lives did not belong in limbo. And the religious authorities had no right to condemn those who had suffered to purgatory. In recent times the Church’s view had changed. Nowadays it was assumed that the person had taken temporary leave of their senses and so was not in a position to exert free will. They were no longer buried at night in disgrace, or in unconsecrated ground, or at crossroads, like criminals destined to wander between the winds or publicly shamed or sent off to be dissected. The papers spoke of accidents or unfortunate cases. Eventually the Church abolished limbo entirely, emptying its chambers, setting them all free. After centuries of condemning the dead and tormenting the grieving, they ruled that it had never existed and that all the misery endured by their loved ones was for nothing, except control.

  The rain and wind were abating, though the storm clouds still hung low in the sky. I decided to make a break for it. Fortune favored the brave. I made a dash for the pebbled shore of the river. I should have noticed that there were no worn paths, no desire lines, ahead. The landscape was slick with rain, and momentum took me a great distance before I realized it was much more sodden than I’d initially thought. What looked like a straight of green from a distance was actually far more treacherous. The mounds of grass that appeared stable and dry had clefts, or were just fragile skins of moss that would collapse, forcing me to step on them only briefly, forcing me on. Some were hidden and others almost Zen-like, reflecting the sky with bone-white fallen branches extending over them. I struggled forward, too far in now to retreat, and for every three footings I managed to reach, there was one where I plunged down into freezing water, lucky to retain my boots, which were covered in thick, clinging mud that slowed my step. I aimed for the shingle, which looked far more clear and far less treacherous in comparison. And exhaling as I reached it, finally touching down, I realized it was not solid at all, but an apparition of landscape that began sinking as soon as my weight came into contact with it, and I was forced to sprint across it. I could not turn back, and there was thicket on every other side of me, bar the river.

  Around the bend of the impossible shore, nothing but more shore. I cursed the place, really cursing my own stupidity. All the nature writers I’d read knew the semiology of the land. I knew the names, the sounds—cygnet, ironwood, willow—but I barely knew what they meant, and even less what they told me about the landscape. The flora might show me paths to dry land or access to wind and light, plants that might indicate copses, shade bearers, a thin shelter belt and thus a way out. I could not read the signs. I had stood in the Gaeltacht parts of western Ireland and wondered at Irish signs, separated from the language. Even beyond words, the land seemed lost to me, or at least untranslatable.

  The storm was battering now. The sluice of each wave was overtaking the last. Finding wreckage of bonfires, a rusted barrel with holes eaten through it, I took some solace that there must have been a way out, but each time I seemed cut off by the river. I would double back on myself, try another route, a third one. I attempted to hike up the banking, but could not get a decent grip on the veins of tree roots, Lovecraftian under the forest’s skin, and slid down in the iron-red clay. My hands were swollen from stings and cuts. I turned to the sky to catch the rain in my face.

  There was no reception on my phone. It was perhaps a blessing. I had no choice but to hack up through a sloping wall of barbed undergrowth. At points it was worryingly steep and I had to cling to overhanging branches, taking deep breaths to summon up another push. Little streams running down the banking made it even more precarious. Finally I reached an accidental staircase of roots and made my way upward through ferns and the omnipresent nettles. I came to the bottom of a large field and tried to duck under the barbed wire, getting my coat snagged in several places. As I struggled to dislodge myself, my top stuck to my back with sweat. The field was a quagmire, with shotgun shells scattered around.

  Through the trees was the boarded-up school, and next to it a Convent of Mercy. A statue of Jesus and Mary and a crucifix, white in the rain. It looked like the punch line to a bad joke. I lay down on the wet grass, catching my breath, listening to the distant sound of a dog barking, and let myself get soaked through to the skin. Staring through the dripping leaves into a sky that fell into infinity.

  Twine

  Certain boys from our estate never got older. Their tale was used to keep the other kids, even years later in my youth, away from the tantalizing path down to the river. There were two separate groups of drowned young men, but time had merged them into one. The first were boys who’d taken a raft of plastic barrels and tires, tied together with twine, out onto the water and were never seen alive again, the call going up when their raft was recovered drifting.

  “They were ten, maybe eleven. Two brothers and another boy. He was an only child. They were a quiet family. They became much quieter after that.”

  This day, with the weather cleared, Tony had joined me walking along the shore, searching for the latest lost boy. Tony had lived with us for two years in Cedar Street when I was a teenager, landing back from America with all manner of outlandish tales and piles of records and underground comics. He would take me and my less unhinged friends out to remote places to fire his shotgun. He’d become like an older brother.

  We talked to pass the time while scanning the river.

  My mother had mentioned the drowned lads to me, claiming the river was cursed, given how many had gone into it down the years. I disagreed. It just offered access to a way out. It paid no attention to the cargo it carried.

  “There was a rundown Gaelic football pitch where the school is now. Your uncle and I were up playing with a few others—I was a bit of a tomboy—and the boys came up and hung around, played a bit. They went off then and they never came back.”

  The other boys were older. The other group who drowned. They’d been drinking in the pub and, full of Dutch courage, decided to take a boat out and row over to Strathfoyle to try to chat up the girls.

  My mother knew them too. “Geoffrey was seventeen. They stay that age, unlike the rest of us. He got drunk with a couple of others. I can’t remember their names. And they made a mistake. He used to tease me. He’d never admit he was friends with what his friends called a Fenian—never really acknowledge my presence in company. But he would joke around when no one else was there. He was quite sweet actually. I liked him, despite myself. Your uncle knew him better.”

  I mentioned the conversation to Tony as we walked, then asked him if he came down to the shore much in those days.

  “All the time. Culmore Point was like an untouchable area back then. It was rich. Properly rich. Money went further then. Staunchly unionist. A separate village really. The city hadn’t come out this far yet. And it felt like it. There was an orchard with a high wall. We’d climb trees, get into trouble, get chased. Tried climbing Culmore Fort many times. Got up high, but never to the top. You don’t have fear at that age.”

  The fort down there wasn’t the original one. There used to be a small castle with triangular battlements pointing to the river. The story went that the skeleton on the city’s coat of arms, sitting looking bored on a moss-covered rock, was a rebellious Gaelic knight starved to death there by his treacherous cousin. No one quite knew the full story. It had been passed down for so many generations that it had changed, like Chinese whispers, and the facts were lost, even though the iconography remained. People in Derry joked that it was someone waiting for their dole check. Now the fort was just a stone tower used to store boats. Pylons soared above it, bridging the river with high-voltage wires straight from the power station. You could hear the electricity from time to time.

  “We got into the lighthouse once, though. It’s bricked up and painted over now. You see that little lough there? It’s pretty shallow, then suddenly it drops down deep. We’d row out the dinghies to the larger boats and just sit in them, fishing or fucking around. Drove the owners mad. They’d shout, ‘Yo
u wee bastards,’ and wait, fuming, for us to row back in. Didn’t give us any incentive to hurry to shore, to be honest.

  “Anthony wasn’t happy with us being there, unsurprisingly. If he saw you heading down the lane, he’d wait and give you a welting that evening when you returned. I don’t know how he held on to the anger all day. Fuming, he was. ‘I’ll teach you to do that again.’ I suppose he was just worried we’d drown, but Christ, he had a funny way of showing it.” Tony laughed. “I used to walk along the river. They had the dump at Gleneagles. That’s why they’ve never built on the Bay Road. They say it’s to keep it as a nature reserve, but most likely they can’t decontaminate the place. Reclaimed land. It was rubbish piled up, literally, into the river. Have it floating off somewhere else for someone else to worry about. They didn’t give a shit about the environment back then. Probably still don’t, but they were brutally honest then. Now there’s a layer of soil and grass on top. They have methane pipes hidden around, releasing the gas, to stop the place from exploding. Who wants their house built on … all that garbage? People don’t even know it was there anymore. We’d go down, play in the dump, looking for prams to take the wheels for go-karts, or wire and elastic to make catapults from.”

  All the days that were lived were shadowed by waste. Built up in piles to be compressed, then finally covered over. Bubbling and fermenting away underneath the clay. The pressure mounting.

  “It was sad, though,” Tony continued. “Some people were so poor they’d wait for the dump truck to pull up and start sifting through the fresh garbage. That was one good thing about the shops getting blown up; they had to dump their food as smoke-damaged, even when it wasn’t. We’d get good stuff every time Superfare went up. Boxes of Cadbury’s—that sort of thing. We’d physically fight over them. They’d barely finished rebuilding it and it’d be hit again. You ever hear what happened to the two young fellas there?”