They waited for me to tell them my movie, but I was unable to find a place to begin.
14
The following day, in the afternoon, Helen asked if anyone wanted to walk around the town of Carrick. Her father had grown up there and she was interested in having a look at the house where he lived. Kevin decided to stay on the boat because he had done the tour of her ‘roots’ once before. So she asked me to go with her instead.
As we walked into the town, she told me that her parents had emigrated. They had moved to Canada when she was around twelve, though she had been sent back to attend boarding school in Dublin. She told me that her father was a doctor and that he had died from cancer some time ago. He was a quiet person who got more fun out of listening to others than talking himself. Her brothers and sisters were living in Canada and her mother was over there, too, living in a small town in Ontario where her father once had a practice.
It seemed to matter to her that I should know all this. It was an affectionate thing to do, I thought, to include me, to fill me in on her family biography, standing in front of the house where her father once came out the door and went to school every day. She said it was a pity it had been turned into offices and she could never get herself to go inside.
The light came seeping up the street from the river. We walked to the end of the town, uphill towards a hospital. The dampness was spreading across the fields all around the town.
We turned from the road into the hospital on the left. Cars were driving in and out, so it seemed that we had come at the time of a shift change. Nurses arriving and leaving. The hospital buildings were grey and dark, made of stone, with a series of new block-built extensions attached. Overall, the place appeared unwelcoming, tall and imposing over the surrounding landscape, with high chimney stacks and crows perched on top. It made me feel small. Perhaps bringing back memories of some frightening architectural features in my own country.
Helen buttoned up her cardigan as she walked. Around by the back of the hospital, a woman wearing white gloves and a white shower cap over her head came out to deposit a sack in a bin. Two elderly nuns made their way into a chapel built at the rear. There was a sign on the wall pointing to ‘The Workhouse’. We followed a path down the hill along the high perimeter wall made of the same grey stone, away from the hospital. About halfway down, there were three steel cauldrons. Large, rusty-brown vessels, like enormous upturned bells. One of them had handles, the others didn’t. There was a V shape cut into the rim so the contents could be poured out and one of them even had a long spout low down.
There was a plaque giving information about the soup kitchens, which we read together in silence. It spoke about the great famine in Ireland during the 1840s. We stood by the cauldrons where they once distributed soup to those who promised to convert their religion.
‘My family survived,’ she said.
I touched one of the cauldrons and it rocked a little, making a hollow, rumbling sound. It seemed so recent, as though they had just been left there and not moved since the time of the disaster.
‘They took up farms that had been left abandoned. They gathered up smallholdings and became prosperous landowners themselves.’
We walked down the path to the graveyard where many of the dead from the workhouse were buried in a mass grave. Beyond the perimeter wall, there was a row of newly built houses, backing on to this memorial site. We sat down on a small wall in the hollow, with the grey buildings towering above us.
She told me a story from her childhood, before the family went to live in Canada. They had a workman who came to the house to do the garden. His name was Traolach, which is the Irish for Terence. They used to give him his dinner and a bit of money. He had lived most of his life in institutions. He was an orphan, sent by social workers who wanted to integrate him into society, but he would never be his own man and always needed to be looked after.
‘He used to go around muttering in his own world,’ she said. ‘You’d hear him shouting and squaring up to things.’
As children they laughed and watched him from a distance. The spade stuck in the ground while he walked back and forth in his wellingtons, stopping to make a speech with his arms folded. ‘I’m trying to help you, but you’re not helping yourself, are you?’ She could remember him coming into the house once and saying, ‘You can’t bring a horse to the water and not let him drink.’
‘Something must have happened to him as a child, because he was very unhappy.’
She told me how her mother used to collect the left-over food and give it to him on a big plate. She would recycle everything from the dinner table. All the bits of roast beef or chicken that were left behind by the family. Her mother covered it all up in a lake of thin gravy to make it look better, with plenty of potatoes and cabbage. Then she would call Traolach inside and they would watch him eat the whole thing up with a ferocious appetite, saying thank you and ‘God bless you’ again and again.
‘I’d love to meet him now,’ she said. ‘If he was still alive today, I’d go and find him and give him an almighty big slap-up dinner somewhere nice. I swear, I’d bring him into Patrick Guilbaud’s and let him have anything he wanted off the menu.’
On the way back into the town we got talking about Kevin. I was afraid she might start interrogating me, but instead she began to discuss the problems with the Concannon family, with Ellis and the absent father.
She told me the story of the drowned woman, and because I was bound to secrecy on this, I had to pretend it was all new to me. Her version was more heartbreaking. Perhaps she told it from the woman’s point of view, how the words of the priest must have terrified the pregnant girl, how the people must have turned to look at her as she was being denounced.
‘If there is no man here in this parish fit enough to marry her,’ was the way she said it, ‘then the best she can do is to drown herself.’
Did she get that wrong? Or was she trying to make it seem less cruel, by putting in the word ‘marry’ instead of ‘drown’? I clearly remembered Kevin saying it this way. ‘If the men are not fit enough to drown her, then perhaps she would have the decency to drown herself.’ His version was more like evidence in court. Or was it possible that the people in the church that morning got it wrong and misread what the priest had said, turning it into a clear instruction to kill or drown the woman? Murder instead of marriage?
In the end, it all came to the same thing. Incitement. She was expelled into the sea.
‘Only Kevin’s father knows the real story,’ she said.
I wanted to tell her about the letters which he had sent home, but I couldn’t do that.
‘Have you been to the Aran Islands?’ I asked her.
‘I get the impression he doesn’t really want me to go,’ she said. ‘I’ve offered to help him find out a little more, but he wouldn’t like that. He went to visit an old aunt on his father’s side who was in hospital in Galway once. She could remember the whole thing happening when she was a small girl, but I don’t know if he got much information out of her because he didn’t talk much about it afterwards.’
Later on, we met up with Kevin and it felt a bit awkward, as if Helen and myself had some kind of secret between us. At dinner with all the others that evening, she made sure we didn’t sit near each other.
‘Most embarrassing moment,’ one of the women announced at one point after the main course, when everyone was drunk. She wanted us all to tell a bad thing about ourselves, some revelation, something we did or said that was really sick or insane.
She got the ball rolling with a story about her five-year-old son coming into the bedroom one morning, picking up a squishy condom that was left under the bed and asking, ‘What’s this, Mammy? Is it chewing gum?’ There was long silence. Some of them laughed a little out of politeness, but most of us didn’t know where to look. Helen was staring down at her plate. The woman who had started the idea seemed genuinely embarrassed and then she insisted on everybody else taking their turn. Kevin
helped her out with a funny story about himself in Australia, when he was living in an apartment block in Melbourne and found himself sleepwalking one night, fully naked. He went down in the lift and started knocking on different doors because he couldn’t find his own apartment, and then he finally woke up when a big sweaty man came out in a vest, with tattoos all over his arms and a beer can in his hand, asking what the fuck he was looking for.
The conversation broke off into a debate about confession and absolution. The owner of the cruise boat said priests had become obsolete in Ireland, replaced by phone-in radio programmes. The whole country had become one big confessional at this stage, everyone getting it off their chest, divulging all the secrets they could think of.
‘Do you get absolution on the radio?’ Helen asked.
‘Of course. Why not?’ Kevin said. ‘The public gives you absolution. The whole idea is to confess and seek forgiveness, so your sins can be cleared, am I right?’
‘That’s shite you’re talking.’
Kevin should have come out and said that he had been sleeping with another woman called Eleanor. I should have said that my father was in the secret police in Belgrade and brought terrible crimes home with him to put under his pillow. But it was not the place for any of this to be said. Our sins remained on the statute books and it was hard to know if you could ever get absolution for things you inherited.
After dinner we went out looking for a quiet bar, somewhere that was not too packed and where you could still talk. It was hard to find a place that was not like a night club. The town was buzzing. People hanging around outside pubs. People walking in the middle of the street in front of cars. Somebody getting sick outside a shoe shop. There were lots of hen parties in Carrick that weekend. Girls dressed in red skirts and fishnet stockings, laughing so much they had trouble walking on their high heels and had to hold on to the wall. A group of nuns came walking past the church, talking and shrieking and one shouted to the other, ‘You’re always the last, Mary,’ as they disappeared in the door of a bar with music blasting out from inside.
15
There was a man standing at the gate. It was early afternoon. I was busy, carrying concrete blocks inside, but I saw him stalling for a moment on the pavement. The first thing that came to mind was the worst. His appearance might have something to do with the court case, some retribution still to come. The payback.
I continued what I was doing, because the cement was already mixed and I had no time to waste. I barely noticed him in the corner of my eye. A man in his late fifties. I took in his shape and his height, along with the haze over the sea and the taste of salt and seaweed drifting up the street which always reminded me of liquorice, somehow. Or iodine. Or cough medicine, for a sore throat. There was a light inshore breeze leaning against the hedges, rattling the blades of a palm tree at the corner house at the top of the street, getting ready for a duel.
What did he want?
He stood right outside the gate, watching me. The gate was closed, at the bottom of the chequered path. Beautiful, the way they designed it diagonally in black and terracotta tiles like a chessboard, with a matching terracotta border separating the path from the flowerbeds. I heard his footsteps coming to a stop, the click of leather on the pavement announcing his presence.
I carried the concrete block up the granite steps into the house. There was lots of granite all over the place around here. Granite slabs. Granite walls. Granite buildings. Granite monuments. Two impressive granite piers reaching out into the bay with a granite lighthouse at each end. From the upstairs windows you could just about see where they mined the rock to build the piers. I’m told that they engineered a funicular railway to carry the rocks down along special laneways while they were building. The metals, they call them, and the weight of the granite coming down would pull the empty cart up. Everybody knows that.
Can I help you? I wanted to say to him, because that’s what they say whenever you go into a shop. Are you OK? Can I help you? Are you looking for something?
There was nobody else in the house at the time but me. He didn’t appear to have any intention of coming inside, doing nothing apart from stopping to look at the house, maybe checking the number to make sure. Is he lost? I wondered. Is he from the tax authorities? Is he just stopping to get a good look at me with a concrete block in my hands? Or does he really have something to do with the legal matters which I hoped were now behind me?
Then I realised that there was something familiar about his face. I made the connection between this man and the unopened letters in the bedroom. Yes, I said, almost aloud. Even though there was not a single picture of this man in the house, I knew him because I had held his letters in my hand. I recognised him. The collar turned up. The hunch in the shoulders. The short forehead. The long hair gone white. The hint of a smile crossing his face, saying good afternoon but not in words.
It was his father. Of course. The man who ‘fucked off’ and left them. How could I have missed it? It suddenly became so obvious to me that I felt like running out, shouting the answer the way a contestant would on a quiz show. You’re the man who sent all the letters, even as recently as last year. You’re the man from Furbo in Connemara. You’re the man who knows all about the drowned woman. You’re the man who gave his children their stony cheekbones, their sandy hair and brown eyes, their left-leaning smiles.
I heard once that the people of Connemara had a lot of Spanish blood in them.
Why didn’t he come inside? Here I was, stepping out through the hall door once more to carry in the last block, getting ready to talk to him, but he was gone again. Later, he came back up the street on the far side, carrying the tang of liquorice with him. As he reached the top of the street, he turned away from the palm tree with the leatherette leaves, vanishing into the centre of the town, maybe never to come again, now that he had seen the house where his letters were sent and went unanswered.
That evening, I met him in the town. He approached me directly this time. He waited for me to finish my drink. When I was ready to leave, he stood at the door, not barring my way but stepping up and making his presence unavoidable.
‘I see you’re doing a bit of work for the Concannons,’ he said.
There was a melody in his accent that was unfamiliar to me.
‘You’re a friend of Kevin’s,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen you drinking with him.’
I smiled out of courtesy.
‘I’m his father,’ he said. ‘Johnny. Johnny Concannon.’
He opened the door for me and shook my hand. He looked around to make sure he was not being overheard. He took out a packet of cigarettes, non-tipped, but then changed his mind and decided not to smoke, returning the packet to his pocket.
‘I don’t want to delay you,’ he said. ‘But could I ask you something?’
‘Of course.’
‘I want to ask you to do me a favour. Would you be able to give him something for me? A gift, like? For his birthday.’
He hesitated, then smiled. I had time enough to look into his eyes. He was only around twenty-five years older than Kevin. An identical version of Kevin from the future, but different inside, different memories, different songs, different stories.
‘You don’t want to give it to him yourself?’ I asked.
He shook his head.
‘It’s a long story.’
My guess was that he had only just come back home and that he wanted to surprise them all. Starting with his son, whom he had not seen since childhood, more or less. The long-lost father, making up for long-lost time.
‘I’d be very grateful to you.’
He asked me to accompany him to where he was living. Just around the corner. He apologised again for taking me out of my way. We stopped at a terraced house where he asked me to wait while he disappeared, down the steps into the basement. It was a large three-storey building of the same style as the one I was working on, only less well maintained. The paint was peeling off the façade and I told myself i
t would take years to restore this one. You’d have to strip the place down to a shell probably. There were torn curtains hanging in one of the windows. The hall door was left open, with two buggies inside and a bicycle. And beside the door, a double line of names and chromatic bells, like a button accordion. Some of the former tenants’ names wiped out and new names from all over the world attached with sticky tape.
When he came out he handed me a small package, neatly wrapped in mauve-and-black paper.
‘Fair play to you,’ he said.
‘You’re sure you don’t want to give it to him yourself?’ I asked once more, because I didn’t feel entirely qualified to represent him in front of the family.
‘You’d be doing me a great favour,’ he repeated, smiling.
What a touching mission this was, stepping into the shoes of a returning emigrant trying to make contact with his own son. I understood exactly how he must have felt, not knowing where to fit in, trying to catch up overnight with all the stories of the children growing up which he had missed over the years.
I carried the gift with me as I walked by the harbour, thinking how he must have left, right here, as a young man in his twenties, when things were so different. Kevin had told me about him coming up on the train from Galway and making his way out to Dún Laoghaire to get the boat. He would have had time to kill, looking into shop windows, walking along the seafront, looking at the yacht clubs. He would have passed by the monument to King George erected on a base of four enormous granite orbs, one of which was blown off by the IRA and later replaced. Past the big cannon at the base of the pier. He would have heard the trains going through the tunnel. He would have seen the arrows pointing towards Holyhead, across the Irish Sea, as though it was only down the street. He would have seen the sign announcing the time of the next sailing.
Hand in the Fire Page 10