Even my father is impressed when I write and tell him I saw Yuri. ‘The first man in space, it’s unbelievable,’ he writes back.
I don’t tell him I waved the Red Flag.
Tanya touches Yuri’s plaque. ‘He showed us anything is possible, but he had integrity, values. Even now he means so much. For us, he represents the old Russia.’
Julka talked about old Russia too. And I realise they don’t mean pre-Revolution Russia, that’s what I call old Russia, they mean the Russia before Communism fell.
‘I wonder what he’d say if he’d lived to see the changes?’ I say.
‘Perhaps it’s better he didn’t, though it broke all our hearts when he died.’
27 March 1968. I’m in Caernarvon, on a university study trip. I’m at Manchester University. I didn’t get to Oxford. My father thinks it’s because of my uncle’s influence. I know it’s because I didn’t work hard enough. I still filter their comments, but I’m enjoying the freedom of not having to answer to either of them any more. Just before we leave the study centre, we hear on the radio about Gagarin’s plane crash. All the way back, each news bulletin on the bus radio gives more updates. The Soviets are being tight-lipped, but the whole of Moscow seems to be out on the streets in mourning.
My father hasn’t come to see me this Easter, so I’m staying with a friend. There’s a telegram waiting for me, the first one I’ve ever had addressed to me personally. It’s from my father’s woman friend. It says my father has died. He’s had a massive coronary, back in Barbados.
I can’t take it in.
I don’t go back for the funeral in Barbados. I never go back.
I spend the next two years in free fall.
Somehow, I manage to get a decent Manchester degree. On Graduation Day, I wonder if my father would have been pleased or disappointed.
‘It’s a good university, Manchester,’ says my uncle, on the day. There’s a slight hesitancy – I can feel him struggling – but he manages it, he manages not to say, ‘but it’s not Moscow State.’
Years later, I do go to Oxford, as a postgraduate. By then, my uncle is dead too. On this second graduation day, sitting in the Sheldonian in Oxford, I think back to my uncle’s sofa and the spats about the Soviets going on over my head.
Now I’m here in Russia, teaching students from Moscow State. My father and uncle are still with me. Do both of them finally approve? So much to argue with them about, so much to thank them for. But they stand quiet.
I trace Yuri’s dates with my finger: 1934–1968. And the tears come.
Tanya doesn’t say anything. She waits a while, then slips her arm in mine, and we make our way across Red Square towards GUM to meet Olga.
The Gravedigger
Helena Kilty
I arrive at the farm as the sun is setting and unpack everything I’ll need from the boot of the car: a bale of straw, a pair of heavy gardening gloves, a roll of thick black plastic, a pickaxe and a small shovel.
As soon as I finish unloading the car, the door of the Irish farmhouse opens. My host, Carmel, emerges, skirt billowing around her ankles, long blonde hair freshly washed and still damp.
‘Welcome,’ she says, gathering me to her, so my head is somewhere between her enormous bosom and her soft face. ‘Let me show you where you’ll be going.’
This will be my first initiation with medicine woman Carmel, part Cherokee Indian. We head into the cold night, the earth squelching under our feet, until we reach a field. She points to a spot towards the back of the field, indicating I should dig here.
‘It has to be the same as any other grave,’ she says.
I nod, grateful that my small frame means I only have to make it five foot five inches long, and grateful too that I have one more sleep left.
When we get back to the house, I eat supper. There won’t be any more food until the deed is done. Knowing that my body’s reaction to fasting is to vomit, I eat light. I have some pieces of roast chicken and three slices of goat’s cheese, followed by a steaming mug of tea. In spite of my inclination to stay up chatting, I know I’ll need my sleep, so I head to bed. In the morning, I will rise with the sun to dig my own grave.
The alarm goes off at four-fifty. I pull on layers of warm clothes. As soon as I’m standing on the gravel, the sun comes up over the mountain. Initially the hues of pink are barely visible but then the colour intensifies, turning orange, spreading out across the skyline. I gather my tools, hope I have the energy to carry this off and head out to the field. I have until sundown to dig the hole.
Where to start? I’ve never been much of a gardener. I know very little about digging earth, though common sense tells me not to dig near any ant colonies. No sign of ants here. The ground is covered in scrub. I find a patch that looks easy and begin to scrape away the weeds. There are loads of them. It quickly becomes frustrating. Every time I put the shovel into the ground, the weeds get in the way. Finally I realise the ground is almost frozen solid. It will take me a long time to dig this thing. Clearly, the best way to proceed is to remove only the top layer of soil and work from there. The plan works.
I keep digging. My hands become blistered, in spite of gardening gloves. My arms ache. My back aches. I’m tired. The hole is not yet shin deep. I feel like I’ve been digging for days, but the sun is still rising.
I put down the shovel. Brandon, Carmel’s black Labrador mix, arrives. He has his favourite squeaky duck with him, and he wants to play.
‘Can’t play now, too busy.’
He looks at me defiantly and flings the yellow duck into the hole. I pick it up and throw it for him. He’s delighted and bounds off to get it. When he returns, I’ve gone back to digging.
He flings Ducky at me again and paws the ground. I ignore him. He gets into the grave with me. Ducky, Brandon and myself have a stand-off. I’m happy to have some company, but I can’t play and dig at the same time. Brandon’s just as stubborn as I am. Also, he knows if he’s patient, I’ll give in. I throw the thing again. After what seems like ages, Brandon gets fed up and heads off.
I think about my young family and hope they’ll sleep easy tonight. I think about my husband and know that they’re safe. He’d never have agreed to this before, but when I’d mentioned it to him last month, he’d agreed easily. ‘We just need you to come back to us,’ he’d said, and I’d felt the familiar sense of guilt settle in my bones.
I go back to focusing on the task at hand. One day, someone will be doing this for me. Who will those men be? I think about their arms, their backs. I say a prayer that the earth is soft for them. I say a prayer for their families. I thank them for their hard graft.
At twilight, Carmel comes to see how I’m getting on. She takes a look at my grave and reckons I’m almost there. Just a few more inches and it’ll be ready. However, I’ve hit a big rock, right where my head will go. I can’t dig around it. I heave and push and pull and plead with the thing to move, but it won’t budge. Finally, we decide I can make the grave longer at the other end, to make up for it. Stepping back to admire my handiwork, I look in. I’ve dug a very large and deep hole for myself. All I need to do now is line it with straw so I won’t be lying directly against damp soil.
Just before six o’clock, I head back to the main house to get ready. I pull on more layers of clothes: a couple of Merino-wool vests and some jumpers, a pair of grey woollen leggings, navy tracksuit bottoms and a pair of waterproof trousers. At sunset, I will get in, cover myself with heavy black plastic and remain there for the night.
Spending the night with mice or rats is not appealing – though I’m not fond of creepy-crawlies either (ticks in particular). However, I get in and pull the tarpaulin over the grave. I’m plunged into complete blackness.
An old friend once told me about camping as a child and waking in the night to find hundreds of ants crawling on the roof of her tent. I reach my hand up to feel along the tarpaulin. The plastic is insect-free. Maybe the ants are waiting. Then they will head for my face first
, next, intimate parts of my body.
I begin to sweat. I should have cheated and made the grave bigger than necessary so I’d have room to move. I am completely hemmed in. I wiggle out of my rain jacket. I’m still too hot. I need to take off my jumper, which is trickier, but I manage it. I hope the temperature won’t drop later in the night.
The task is to feed to death all that gets in the way of living fully. To do this, I need to stay awake. And be present to whatever comes, even if it is ants. My body begins to shake. At first it is gentle, but then it becomes more pronounced.
I’m surprised that an ex-boyfriend springs to mind. The evening we broke up, we’d had dinner with friends. On the way home, he’d asked should we end things. I wasn’t surprised. We hadn’t made love in over twelve months. I wanted to say it was nothing at all to do with him. I wanted to tell him that a cloak of blackness had settled itself around me and I couldn’t shake it off, but I sat there silently. Eventually I told him we should do whatever he thought was best. In spite of the three and a half years, when he nodded and said, ‘I think we should leave it at that,’ I felt nothing. The entire relationship plays itself out; all the moments I left him wondering what the hell was going on with me. I’m left with a knot in my belly, recognition that I was scared of getting too close. I’ll ring him when I get out, and apologise.
The grass rustles. I hold my breath. Is it a colony of giant ants? The rustling gets closer.
The night in America when an acquaintance spiked my drink suddenly flashes at me. The numbness waited till I was in the taxi and crept up my legs and into my hips, all in one go. An image comes, of me perplexed at the sensation of partial paralysis; the taxi driver catching my eye in the rear-view mirror. From the distance of a decade, it’s easy to recognise the tone of resignation in his insistence that he wants no part in any of this. Another one, of me laughing at him, still innocent then; sure aren’t they taking me home? I begin to sweat again. The shaking becomes more violent, until it feels as though the grave itself is shaking. He’s most likely still in Cape Cod or some other part of America. It was a long time ago. The chances that he’s in a field in Kildare are slim. Nonetheless, some form of paw or foot pounds the earth firmly. Brandon has been locked in for the night. The few other people that know I’m here will not come near me until morning. There are no tigers or bears in Ireland, not even in Kildare, but the grass is being pounded by something heavy. Not knowing if it’s the middle of the night or still evening, I prepare myself for the possibility that a stray walker, or worse, may stumble across the grave and fall in.
The rustling is almost upon me. My heart beats quickly and fiercely. For a very brief moment I hear the sound of a second heartbeat. Something snorts. It’s not a human sound. I hold my breath. After a few moments, whatever it is begins to move away, leaving me alone again. There are cows in the next field. Perhaps one of them escaped.
My skin is clammy, and nausea rises from my belly. The straw, scratchy against my bare neck, smells as though it’s been lying in a corner of a stable for the past number of weeks (which it has). I press my face against the earthen wall, letting the pleasant smell of damp clay waft up my nostrils.
With my head resting on the slab of stone I couldn’t move earlier and the right side of my face pressed against the soil, I begin to cool down. I’m reminded of those familiar lines, ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ And then it comes, like I knew it would.
It begins always at the same moment. I’m in the car. Rain hits the bonnet in thick dense sheets. He really does appear from nowhere. There’s a heavy thump-thud of weight against bumper. People who know about these things say everything slows down, and they’re right. There’s enough time to think I imagined it. Then comes the fracturing of windscreen; he hurtles through glass, as though someone’s picked him up and flung him right at me. There’s the back of his head, the soft folds of neck, a left arm, crook of elbow. In spite of this, there’s an instant of thinking I’ve hit a deer, a brief moment where things might still be all right.
The traction of the glass causes him to bounces backwards, so that he lands face down on wet tarmac. I call an ambulance, but they tell me it’ll take forty minutes to reach us. Liquid dribbles from his right ear. Eventually he starts to breathe. He gulps air thickly, as though, having spent time at the bottom of an ocean, he’s now risen to the surface. I hold his hand and peer closely at his profile. If I manage to keep him alive till the ambulance arrives, surely they can keep him alive after that? After a minute, he starts to move and tries to get his broken body up off the ground. Should I let him stand up? Blood oozes stickily from the top of his head. His elderly face is smashed and concave. I did this to you, I think. I did this to you.
At the funeral, the priest makes sure to say that he’d known death was coming for him. ‘Without immediate family, he was afraid of dying alone,’ the priest says, before looking into the pews to hold my gaze; ‘well, we can be grateful he was not alone when death finally came.’ I wrap the oversized woollen coat around me, more for protection than for heat; the church is surprisingly humid. He’s trying to alleviate my guilt. I feel numb.
Outside the church, his god-daughter shakes my hand and thanks me for coming. She knows this must be difficult, but it means a lot to them, she says, before adding that he’d taken to getting confused and wandering out at night. My face hurts then, from the effort of not crying.
The heat has spread to my whole body. Nausea rises again; the muscles in my stomach contract. I roll over to my side and rest my head at the top of the grave. Acrid bile; is that noise coming from me? A wail rises from my belly and rolls through me.
My heart thumps strongly. The earth holds me, safe. Some form of creepy-crawly moves steadily beside my left eye; its legs make a tiny click-click as they go forward. There is a second heartbeat in the grave now, pressing my ear further into the moist clay, it sounds as though it’s coming from deep within the molten core. My own heartbeat tries to match it. Then it is gone, only mine remains. If I travel through the blame, what’s on the other side? I cry out. I’m not sure I believe in God. Is that who I’m calling to now?
I remember a story I was told once, that at the moment of death our heart will be placed carefully on a weighing scale. If we have lived well, it will be in balance. If we have not, it will be either too light or too heavy. I have been wearing guilt and shame like a second skin, since long before the accident. I’ve been wearing it my entire life. I can’t keep living like this. This is not life.
Eventually my breathing settles. I imagine my body dissolving, decomposing; the creepy-crawlies I’m avoiding take tiny pieces of my body, carrying me off to wherever they go. I imagine the worms eating me, taking me in as one thing, passing me out as something else. My body starts to shake, and the sweating comes again. This time, I just go with it. The cells of my body start to tingle, oscillating at their own unique frequency. I’m acutely aware of my skin, the way it hangs on my bones, bends and expands as I move my knee towards the wall of the grave.
These arms pick up my children, hold them dearly. These hips carry them from room to room. These strong legs walk the prom in Salthill, the wind blowing rain into my face, leaving traces of salt along my cheeks, on my lips. This body dances to Bob Dylan at home in my kitchen, bare feet enjoying contact with the smooth lino floor; it enjoys making love. I want more of all that.
The birds begin to move restlessly in the trees above me, getting ready for second dawn. Finally, I hear Carmel’s voice. ‘The night is over. I welcome you into the first day of your new life.’
I stand up and look around me. The sun is rising again over the mountain.
The Healer
Derek Flynn
No one knew for sure how the house – if that was the right word for it – had appeared on the beach. They’d simply woken up and it was there. Mikey Bolger said he’d heard the banging in the middle of the night, but no one else had, and no one really took too much notice of Mikey.
&nb
sp; All they knew for sure was that the day before it had been a pile of junk, and today it was something that – if you were feeling generous – could be called a ‘dwelling’.
The junk had started to appear a month before. At first, it was just some old planks of wood, mouldy and water-damaged, that looked like they had washed up on the beach. But as the wood pile increased in size, the locals started to realise it was something more. They wondered if someone was building a bonfire, but Halloween was months away, and pretty soon other items began to accumulate that put paid to that idea: hubcaps, fluorescent beer signs, an armchair and even a life-size cardboard cut-out of Sean Connery that looked like it had come from a cinema or a video store.
But no one had seen who it was leaving all the junk there. The Worm said it was like the old fairy story about the elves that came in the night to do the shoemaker’s work for him. But nobody really believed that elves were doing the work.
Except, maybe, Mikey Bolger.
Each day, Joe Ryan, out for his daily constitutional, would walk along the beach and scour the junk pile for any newly added oddities. That night, in the Wreck bar, Joe and the other locals would compare notes and advance their latest theories on who was responsible and why.
And then, one day, it stopped.
There were no new additions to the pile. For three days, it sat there, as bemused locals took their walks and stood staring at the junk pile as though it was a trick, as though they had somehow been duped. The rumour mill went into overdrive as people speculated as to what could have happened. Aliens were even mentioned at one stage.
But again, that was probably Mikey Bolger.
The sense of curiosity that had gripped the village of Ardmore Bay slowly turned to a kind of panic. No one said as much, but you could see they were missing their mysterious night figure and his deposits of scrap. What if that was it? What if it was over and the person was never coming back? What then?
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