Migrations

by Charlotte McConaghy

  We manage to get down the ladder and below deck. My teeth are tiny jackhammers. Into the little bathroom with its shower so narrow I have to step out to wash my hair. She wrenches off my sweater and shoves me under a stream of hot water. It burns so badly I bite my tongue and taste copper. Knees give out, and she catches me in time to sink with me to the floor, both of us soaked and scalded now, a tangled mess of extremities freezing and burning and everything in between.

  “What is wrong with you?” she asks again, but really asking now.

  I give a breath of laughter. “How much time do you have?”

  Her arms tighten about me, shifting to an embrace.

  I don’t have the energy for more, so I say only, “I’m sorry,” and I mean it.

  4

  NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, GALWAY, IRELAND TWELVE YEARS AGO

  ““We ate the birds,” he says. “We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted their wings, we wanted to fly as they did, soar freely among the treetops and the clouds, and so we ate them. We speared them, we clubbed them, we tangled their feet in glue, we netted them, we spitted them, we threw them onto hot coals, and all for love, because we loved them. We wanted to be one with them.”

  There is silence in the enormous hall. He is small, down there behind his lectern. And big enough to fill the space. Loud enough, powerful enough. We are hanging on his every word, even if the words don’t belong to him, even if he is only saying to us what Margaret Atwood said first.

  “They have been here for two hundred million years,” he says, “and until recently there were ten thousand species. They evolved to go in search of food, traveling farther than any other animal to survive, and thus they colonized the earth. From the oilbird, which lived in pitch-black caves, to the bar-headed goose, which bred only on the desolate Tibetan plateau. From the rufous hummingbird, which survived in the freezing altitude of fourteen thousand feet to the Rüppell’s griffon vulture, which could fly as high as a commercial airplane. These extraordinary creatures were undoubtedly the most successful on earth, because they courageously learned to exist anywhere.”

  My heart is beating too fast and I will myself to be calm, to breathe more slowly, to really take this in. To savor it and remember every detail because too soon I will be gone from the circle of his perfect words.

  The professor moves out from behind his lectern and spreads his hands beseechingly. “The only true threat to birds that has ever existed is us.

  “In the 1600s the Bermuda petrel, of the Procellariidae family, the national bird of Bermuda, was hunted for meat so catastrophically that they were thought to be extinct. Until, in 1951, by sheer accident they were found again, only eighteen pairs of them. They were hiding, nesting in the cliffs of small islands. I imagine that day a great deal.” He pauses as though to imagine it now, and I marvel at the command he has over the hall. I am with him on those cliffs, discovering those lonely little birds, the only survivors of their kind. He goes on, and his voice is hard now, demanding. “They did not survive our second attack. This one was crueler, far more pervasive. With the burning of fossil fuels we changed the world, we’ve killed it. As the climate grew hotter and the sea levels rose, the Bermuda petrels were washed from their burrows and drowned. That is one species of a very great many. And it’s not only birds that suffer—as I’ve said, birds tend to be the most resilient. Polar bears are gone, thanks to that rise in temperature. Sea turtles have gone, the beaches where they once lay their eggs eroded by those same rising seas. The ringtail possum, which could not survive temperatures above thirty degrees Celsius, was decimated by a single heat wave. Lions perished in never-ending droughts, rhinos were lost to poaching. And on it goes. Those are simply a few you know of, the stars of the animal kingdom, but if I started listing the creatures destroyed by habitat destruction we would be here all day. Thousands of species are dying right now, and being ignored. We are wiping them out. Creatures that have learned to survive anything, everything, except us.”

  He walks back to his lectern and turns on his projector. He is tall and lean, maybe even thin, with short, dark hair and an impeccably tailored navy suit. A lime-green bow tie makes him seem a man of another time, as do glasses that can really only be called spectacles. Despite his strange appearance he is the darling of the university staff. Adored by his students. Almost young enough to be one of them. There is a table with a covering over it, its image projected large onto the wall. He slides the calico off with a magician-esque flourish to reveal a bird.

  It takes me a moment to realize that it is real, dead and stuffed and pinned to some sort of apparatus so that it appears in flight. A gull, white and gray and too much. Like that, I am no longer with him; I have fallen behind. I stand and move awkwardly past the other students in my row, causing a mild rustle of annoyance but not caring, needing out.

  His voice follows me. “This semester we will be looking not only at the anatomy of birds, but their breeding, feeding, and migration patterns, and how these have been affected over time—both negatively and positively—by human interference—” The door falls shut with a slight bang that they will have heard inside. I run, sandals slapping the lino. Out into the sunshine, down the steps to where I’ve locked my bike. I work the code with unsteady fingers and then I ride as fast as I can, my hair streaming behind me, through cobblestone streets and all the way to the sea.

  The bike crashes to the ground and I hop to get my shoes off, flinging them to the grass and sprinting until I hit the water and dive beneath the surface.

  Here is the sky. The salty weightless sky. Here I can fly.

  * * *

  I genuinely consider not going back. I’m growing restless—I don’t like being so close to the house my mother and I once shared. I’m tired of Galway. But being in the university is serving a purpose: it allows me access to their genealogy software, and that is how I’m going to do it, that is how I will find my mother.

  “You’re late.”

  “My gift to you, Mark, since you take such pleasure in pointing it out.” I dump my bag in the locker and pull on my janitor’s jumpsuit. Mark does not look impressed, so I grab the mop and bucket and get moving.

  “You’re on the film buildings.”

  “Can’t I do the labs?”

  “Franny—”

  “I’ll do overtime,” I promise as I wheel my bucket out. “Thanks!”

  Someone has made a revolting mess in the male bathroom in the biology building. I pull my T-shirt up over my nose and try not to gag as I clean it. Three young men are waiting to use the bathroom as I emerge, expressions full of distaste and maybe a little disdain, as though I am responsible for the mess. They don’t look me in the eye as I pass, they don’t even glance my way—hardly anyone in this school does. Being a cleaner is like having the power of invisibility. So I make a game of it. I smile at people. Mostly they seem to think I must be a wee bit touched, and hurry on by. But sometimes, occasionally, they return the smile, and those smiles are sweet enough to collect.

  I use my key card to enter the lab itself. I can’t see anyone, which would make sense as it’s after hours, except the lab usually contains the huddled forms of the obsessive, those uninterested in the outside world and unwilling to leave here no matter the time of day. I don’t turn the lights on, but move into the quiet, cool space wreathed only in the red glow from the security monitors. Specimens are kept in even lower temperatures, in metal refrigerated drawers that hiss as they are opened and closed. I run my fingers over the edges of them, imagining all the little treasures inside and wanting so much to peek. I can’t risk it—I’d hate to damage something—so I wander on, my cleaning gear forgotten at the door. Mostly the lab is filled with desks covered in different types of testing machinery, but there are also shelves holding hundreds of glass jars and bottles and tubes, and these glitter a little in the dim winking lig
ht. I move past the empty glass to the insects and reptiles held in ethanol, as fascinated by them as I am repulsed. They don’t look real, floating motionless in there. Or maybe they look too real.

  These are easier to consider than the bird in the lecture hall this morning. I should know better: thoughts conjure their like. As I turn my head a fraction I see it. There, in the corner of my eye.

  I have always been frightened of dead things, birds more so than anything else. There is nothing so disturbing as a creature born to flight being bound to dull lifelessness.

  I turn from the white shape of it and come face-to-face with a person. A yelp escapes my mouth. “Jesus.” I lift a hand to my pounding heart.

  It’s the professor, watching me in the dark.

  “The girl who fled my class,” he says. His gaze goes to the cleaning trolley near the door, then back to me. “Come here.”

  I am momentarily stunned as he takes my elbow and steers me toward the dead gull. The presumption of his touch makes my mouth dry, but since I will always be a person who craves boldness, I am also thrilled by it. Then I am looking at the creature and I have no thoughts for touch, I am empty of any thoughts except the one telling me to get away from here. I go for the door but he—astonishingly—grabs my arms and holds me in front of him, holds me firm, traps me before this macabre thing.

  “Don’t be frightened. There’s nothing here but flesh and feathers.”

  Doesn’t he know? That’s the problem.

  “Open your eyes.”

  I open them and look. The bird is frozen and staring. Its feathers are clean and smooth. Eyes lifeless. It’s such a sad, still thing that my chest aches. Delicate and sweet and all the worse for it.

  The professor lifts my hand and guides it to the carcass. I want nothing less than to touch it but I’ve entered a dreamscape and no longer have control of my limbs. The pad of my index finger is pressed ever so lightly to the edge of a wing feather.

  “Primary coverts,” he says softly.

  He traces my finger for me, up the length of the feather to different feathers of the wing, “greater coverts, median coverts, scapular,” then up over the body, the shoulder area, the neck, “mantle,” he murmurs, “nape,” and up to the soft shape of the bird’s skull, “crown.”

  He lets me go and my hand drops away. And yet, in the quiet weightlessness of the moment, I feel it itching to go back, to touch the creature again. To join my skin with its feathers, breathe air back into its lungs.

  “The vessel is as graceful as the life was,” the professor says.

  I wake from the dream. “Is this how you seduce your students? With scientific terms in a dark lab?”

  He blinks, surprised. “It’s not.”

  “I didn’t say you could touch me.”

  He steps back immediately. “Forgive me.”

  My pulse is thrumming and on fire and I want to punish him for making me feel out of control, except that I also love being out of control and the whole thing is so confusing that it becomes repulsive and I turn for the door without looking at him.

  “Don’t be late to class,” he calls as I grab my trolley and shove it into the corridor. But I don’t have any intention of ever nearing Professor Niall Lynch again.

  * * *

  The car that picks me up is a rusting old Ford, driven by two young women. I have rules about hitching: no vans, no trucks, no cars driven by single men. I learned this rule after stupidly climbing into a panel van when I was fourteen and being ordered to give the middle-aged driver a blow job.

  There are two surfboards tied to the roof and sand all over my seat: the girls are surfers. They take me south along the coast and stop at a hostel, where we drink ourselves numb and talk about our fears. Their names are Chloe and Megan and they follow the swells. Outside a murmuration of starlings throbs its glorious way through the white sky.

  I go in search of the water. It doesn’t take me long to catch the scent, to feel the tug. There’s a compass in my heart that leads me not to true north but to true sea. No matter which direction I turn, I will find myself being persistently corrected. The low roar reaches me first, as always, and the smell.

  The girls follow me and I lead them down to it. We drink red wine that stains our mouths black and I gather sea spaghetti for later, when it can be cooked in a billy pot and eaten sloppily with fingers straight from the fire. There are empty shards of shells shining silver in the moonlight, and they grow into a shimmering trail I must follow, leaving behind the warmth of voices and laughter. The trail leads me into the water, so I take off my clothes and dive in, the cold a knife to my lungs and laughter flying from me in birdlike screeches.

  This is the stretch of coast—the Burren, it’s called—where my mother’s family is from. They have dwelled here where the hills are silver with slate for hundreds of years. When I was sixteen I came back here, but found no one. I tried again at nineteen. And once more now, at twenty-two. This time I am determined to stay as long as it takes; I have rented a room in a shared house and found myself a job, and each minute I’m not working I spend in the library trying to sketch out a family tree. It’s been difficult because so many people share the same names and I have no idea which lines I belong to or even which Iris Stone is actually my mother. It’s my deepest hope that if I find even just one member of her family, they will lead me to her.

  At sunrise I watch Chloe and Megan pull on their wet suits and run into the surf to press their powerful bodies into the teeth of it. I could watch the paddle and rise and twist of them all day long. They know the ocean well, but they fight it, somehow. They pound and bash against it as swimmers don’t, cleaving their waxed weapons through its walls. It’s violent.

  I join them without a wet suit or a board, just my own thin skin. The ocean washes away anything bitter left upon me, remaking me fresh. I am smiling so widely as I emerge that it must almost split my face. The three of us collapse onto the warm sand; they unzip each other and wriggle free.

  “Nine degrees in there,” Chloe says with a laugh. She shakes her matted locks and a kilo of sand pours free. “How do you do it without a suit?”

  I shrug, grin. “Seal blood.”

  “Oh, aye, you’ve the dark look of them, too.”

  I’ve been told this before. It’s the black hair and the black eyes and the pale, pale skin. It’s how the black Irish used to look, back in the days when folktales were true and people might really have come from the sea. It’s how my mother looks.

  “Where are we headed today?”

  “I’ll walk from here,” I say. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “How will you get back?” Megan asks.

  “Back to where?”

  “Galway. Your life. Isn’t that where it is?”

  I don’t know the answer to that. I had thought my life was just here, with me.

  * * *

  The Bowens live in a pink cottage outside Kilfenora. They own the town pub, Linnanes, and they are all in the Kilfenora Céilí Band, which has traveled the world. I’ve watched videos of them online, and I found two of their CDs in an underground music shop in Galway, much to my delight. These I have been listening to on repeat for a month. Now that I’m here I can hardly speak for nerves. It takes all my courage to knock on the front door, but it isn’t answered and when I peek around the side I’m fairly sure no one’s home.

  So I hop the fence, a woman possessed. I want to understand where my mam comes from. I want to know if she ever lived here, or even just visited. These would be her cousins, I think, maybe second or third cousins. A great-aunt, maybe? Or perhaps I have it wrong and they are even further relations than that, perhaps the branches skewed apart generations ago, but I know that in some small way they are family, and that is enough for me.

  There is washing on the line and the back door is open a crack. Something barks seconds before it crashes into me and I find myself accosted by a black-and-white sheepdog, all tongue and eyes and paws of excitement. I wrestle the do
g off me with a grunt and a laugh and that’s when—

  “Who’s that?”

  I look up to see an old woman in the back doorway. She has a violet woolen pullover on, and short white hair and glasses and slippers.

  “I … Hi, I’m really sorry, I…”

  “What’s that?”

  I go closer, which is tricky with the dog leaning against my legs as though she’s missed me all her life. “I’m looking for Margaret Bowen.”

  “That’ll be me.”

  “My name’s Franny Stone,” I say. “Sorry to just come in.”

  “Stone? You’ll be a relation, then?” And just like that she smiles and then laughs with delight and ushers me in. And she keeps laughing all the while she makes me a cup of tea, and while I tell her how I got here, by hitching and walking, and she laughs all the more when she starts calling round to her family and telling them they have to come over tonight. And I know that she’s not laughing at me, she’s laughing for happiness, for life, and I know just as well that she laughs like this all the time, every day, every minute. She is an absolute joy of a human being and I almost start crying right here in her kitchen as she jokes about needing a hot toddy instead of a boring old cuppa tea.

  “Who is it then, love, which bit of the family do you come from?”

  I panic, suddenly, and say, “I’m from the Australian branch.”

  “Australia?” This seems to confuse her. “Goodness, you’ve come a long way then. What is it brought you here then?”

  I don’t tell her that I’m Irish, too. It feels fraudulent. As though she is the real Irish and I am only a pretender. I say instead that our family left Ireland five generations ago and settled in Australia, which they did on my father’s side, I’m told. I say that I’ve always wanted to come back here and find the other side of the family, those descended from the ones who stayed, instead of the ones who left. This is truer to my nature, surely, and maybe this is why it feels right to share. That I am of the leavers, the searchers, the wanderers. The ilk of those taken by the tides, instead of the steadfast, the true. But that a part of me has always wanted to belong here.