‘We have to help her,’ Helen said. ‘She’s not answering her phone.’
I knew exactly what to do. We arrived late at night, when the funeral guests were gone. Helen drove past the Concannon house and there was a light left on downstairs, probably in the kitchen at the back, a glimmer of sleeplessness coming through the fanlight and the frosted-glass panels. She parked the car down at the end of the street, close to the seafront, pointing away from the house to enable us to get away quickly.
As we passed by the house once more on foot, I noticed the security camera installed over the front door. A movement detector switched on automatic security lights, illuminating the entire front garden like a football stadium. We walked into the laneway at the side of the house and around to the back. I got a foothold in the granite wall and managed to look across. Rita was still up, reading something on her laptop in the kitchen or maybe just staring at it and not reading at all. Her face looked blue. There was also a light on in the room where Ellis slept. We agreed that I would gain entry to the house first and then I would let Helen in by the front door so she could go up and get Ellis.
Strictly speaking, this was breaking and entering. I was fully aware of the penalties for trespassing. I was not so worried about fingerprint evidence, because my prints were already everywhere in the house. Cameras had also been fitted at the back and I didn’t like the idea of ending up in court again, this time with the Concannon family testifying against me.
I put on a baseball cap and a scarf over my mouth, then climbed up on to the granite wall. From there I made my way on to the kitchen extension, taking care to shield my face from the camera and also to make no more noise than necessary, like a cat crossing the roof. I had very good information about the house, such as the window to the mid-level bathroom not having a lock. It was easily opened and I even remembered the point at which it jammed. I would have fixed this, along with a lot of other things around the house that were crying out to be done, if I had been allowed to continue working there. The lead pulleys needed to be replaced inside the frame and I had all kinds of plans for routing out the wood and putting in double-glazed panels.
It was nothing to climb through the window. I had to be cautious not to step on to the toilet bowl or lean on the sink for support, because these were old fittings that would not take much weight. Also, the floor. You tend to have an instinctive memory of house sounds, so I had to rely on that intuitive recall of creaks and expansion sounds as I walked out from the bathroom on to the landing.
Remembering the floorboards was probably not unlike the way music operates and how singers remember the words of songs without any effort once they are in motion. I read somewhere about a test carried out on concert pianists which proves that they know some micro-seconds in advance when they’re going to make a mistake. But it’s already too late by then and they cannot correct it. Something like this happens when you step on a creaking board. The important thing is to carry on with confidence and not let on that you’ve made a mistake.
The house remained silent. Which is not really an accurate way of speaking about a house at night. It was full of shouts on the stairs, full of absence, full of words and memories and laughter and crying noises left in the rooms. All that was ever said and unsaid in the family. Even the sound of my own voice included, as well as all the hammering and squeaking of wood and de-nailing yelps that came with my work.
What we had not noticed initially while we were passing by was that Kevin’s car was parked on the street. I could see it now, through the fanlight as I made my way down the stairs. Was he in the house asleep, or was he out somewhere, on the night of his father’s funeral? I gave him the benefit of doubt and assumed that he was present, upstairs in bed.
There were other unknown factors, such as the alarm system. I expected the front door to be triggered for partguard. When I opened it to let Helen in, I was very surprised that the alarm failed to go off.
Helen wore her leather jacket over her head like a headscarf so as not to be recognised on camera. I closed the front door with a click that was so minuscule, it could have been the sound of a snail falling out from a cavity in the granite wall outside. I guided her up the stairs, pointing to all the places where she was permitted to place her feet. She was much lighter than I am, so that helped.
We stood on the landing, outside Ellis’s door. Helen quietly opened the door and disappeared inside. Rita was downstairs in the kitchen and I had the urge to go into her bedroom and switch on the light, just to see if the black ash wardrobes were really as bad as I thought they were. And since I was a genuine intruder now, I thought I might as well steal the letters from Johnny Concannon that were sent with the ice-cream money. But I did nothing of the sort, only waited until Helen came out with Ellis, all dressed and ready to go.
Ellis smiled at me and was about to talk, but Helen placed her index finger on her lips.
We made our way down the stairs, but then something happened that every musician must fear most. Laughter. Something in the tension of the performance that triggers off a temporary inability to take what you are doing seriously any more. It’s the weight of concentration pressing down and the trapdoor of comedy letting go underneath. A moment of sheer relief in which you see only the funny side of things. You laugh precisely when you tell yourself not to. It always happens in solemn places, at interviews, in church, in police stations. Even during sex. Like sheer blasphemy. Situations where you are least expected to laugh but where you are confronted with something that is not unlike vertigo, when you give in to the urge to throw yourself over the ledge into the disaster of bottomless laughter.
Ellis could not help herself. It was the idea of being freed from her family that must have gone to her head. The dizziness of liberation, just before the escape was complete and she was not yet out of danger. Nerves, that’s all, letting go of the restraint. She had to hold on to the banisters with one hand and Helen’s shoulder with the other, trying to contain herself as well as she could, but unable to get her own legs to carry her any further. Helen frowned to remind us not to blow it, but that only made things worse. We were on the last set of stairs, prevented from making that final stretch to the front door.
Ellis laughed so much that she sank down on to one of the steps with her right knee. The worst thing you could do in a situation like that was to look at each other. But it was already too late by then, because Ellis saw into my eyes and the highly infectious quality of laughter spread to me instantly. I began going down like a collapsing housing block, detonated for urban renewal. Helen gave me a clout on the back of the head and I looked at her with such an expression of surprise and offence that she could not stop herself laughing as well.
So that was it. The three of us stalled on the stairs, laughing as silently as possible until Ellis could not hold it any longer and moaned as though a loose nail had gone up through her foot.
Light burst into the hallway and the laughter stopped as abruptly as it started. We looked down and saw Rita Concannon standing in the doorway to the kitchen.
‘What’s going on?’ she said.
She was wearing her dressing gown and I could see the unevenness in her chest, with one side flat from her operation. I felt really sorry for her. She had lost everything and now we were taking Ellis away. Her eyes were narrowed and her lips tight. The pattern of her life-story accumulated into one stare.
‘Kevin,’ she shouted. ‘We’ve got trouble here.’
Nobody knew what to say, on the day of a funeral, so I took it on myself to speak up for everyone, just to calm things down.
‘She’ll be back,’ I said. ‘You’ll see, Mrs Concannon, she won’t be away for long.’
‘Intruders,’ she shouted.
‘We’re not abducting her,’ I said. ‘She wants to go with us, to visit Furbo.’
It was not about freedom of movement so much. We just wanted Ellis to come with us on a journey to see where her father grew up and where the drowned woman was
found on the island. It was hard to explain all that to Mrs Concannon in one go.
‘Ellis,’ she said, speaking past me. ‘You need help through this.’
Ellis told us later that she was already booked into a clinic in London which specialised in family planning and terminations. Flights and all taken care of. Kevin had promised to accompany her. She had agreed with these plans but then changed her mind on the stairs.
‘I’m going to have the baby,’ she said, which was as much of a surprise to herself as anyone else.
‘You haven’t thought this through, Ellis,’ her mother said.
‘You’ll be glad,’ I said to Rita, like an expert in family counselling.
‘Don’t listen to them, Ellis.’
‘I’ve made up my mind,’ Ellis said. ‘I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.’
They stared at each other and I was afraid that Ellis would start laughing again.
‘A baby makes everything right,’ I said. ‘Wait till you see.’
I could have pushed the point and said that babies correct all our mistakes. They are the great correctors of the world. They repair everything going back in families for hundreds of years, all the way back in history, everything that’s ever been broken. This was her chance to look forward into the future instead of looking back all the time.
But there was no need to say any of that because Rita Concannon had already made the conversion. All we were waiting for was her to come and embrace her daughter.
There was movement in one of the rooms upstairs. The sound of bare feet across the floor above us. It was Jane. Then it was Kevin, too, woken by our voices on the stairs. It’s hard sometimes to say what happened first. Did we bolt or did we wait until Kevin was on the landing? My guess is that it all happened at once, the way you would strike a match or begin a song.
‘It’s all right, Kevin. Let them go,’ said Rita.
By that time, we were already out the front door and down the terracotta path, through the gate. Outside on the street, as we were running away, I looked back and saw the casement window. I even stalled for a moment to reassure myself what a beautiful job myself and Darius had made of it, knowing that we had left nothing unfinished. I saw Kevin running out the front door, putting his coat on and stepping with his bare feet into his shoes. Rita was at the casement window, looking down the street after us.
I thought of what he was going through. All that guilt going around inside his head about not accepting the medal from his dad and walking away from Helen and turning his back on me when I was the only friend he could trust. On top of all that, he must have known that I was the cause of his violence. He must have seen something happening between Helen and myself on that first night we met. And now we were taking Ellis with us.
Helen pulled me by the arm and we continued running.
His car was pointed in the wrong direction, so he came straight down the street after us on foot. Even then, I wanted to stop and explain to him that we were not stealing his sister, only taking her on a trip to the islands. But there was no time for words and he would not have understood my point of view without using his fists.
We got into the car and Helen did all the right things, fumbling with the keys in the ignition and starting the engine at the last minute and driving away just before he reached us. There may have been the bang of a fist on the glass. Ellis looked back with great concern through the rear window and Helen asked her if she wanted to stop.
‘Go,’ Ellis said, so we carried on and I didn’t have the heart to look at him, standing in the street with his coat open and his bare legs and his bare feet inside his shoes.
We drove only for a very short time before stopping again because Ellis had to be sick. She stepped out on to the pavement and Helen supported her under the arms while I kept looking back into the street with my usual premonition of things to come. By the time they got back in and Helen drove on again, Kevin had caught up with us in his car. We raced away. Ellis screamed. I knew there was no point in trying to escape. He had a faster car and he was more dangerous, more immortal, more willing to give up everybody’s life and drive us all into the sea to make his point.
Within seconds he had overtaken us. He swerved right in front and forced Helen to pull in so hard, the car bounced on to the pavement and came to a stop. The engine cut out. It was a quiet street, with trees and houses set back from the road so far that nobody would hear a thing.
We sat still, waiting. We watched his car door opening and saw him stepping out, chest bare under his coat. His sandy hair came up gold under the yellow lights. He started walking towards us, taking the time to stand right in front of Helen’s car in order to recognise each one of us individually, staring us right in the eyes. There was time enough for us to go back over all the good things we remembered about him as well as all the bad things. Time enough to wish that he would accept things the way they were now and not feel diminished by giving in and being generous.
He pinned us back with the force of his intellect, each one of us facing the full charge of his accusation in open court. He was so good with words that he had no need to say anything. He had the lawyer’s confidence to wait and allow guilt to come running towards him with both hands up. He stared at Helen in the driving seat, then at me in the passenger seat, drawing out our silent confessions while he made up his mind how to bring the full impact of his justice to bear on us with the best of his violent abilities. He took in a deep breath and ran his hand through his hair. The tension in his eyes was spring loaded. So much potential rage waiting to break free. He was searching for the most imaginative way of exacting punishment.
He came towards us and walked around on my side of the car. Then he opened the back door. Ellis looked up without moving. She let out a tiny, scared sound from the back of her throat, maybe a weird kind of giggle.
It was clear that none of us would put up any resistance and Helen put her hand on mine to make sure I understood that.
Kevin placed his elbow on the roof of the car and leaned inside, pointing at Ellis.
‘If you’re going to have this baby,’ he said. Then he seemed to lose his vocabulary. It took him a while to search for the correct words that would pin down exactly what he wanted to say.
‘That’s what I came to tell you,’ he said. ‘Everything is going to be OK, Ellis. Whatever you decide is right.’
He stood back and paused for a moment. Then he closed the door and walked away. He didn’t wait for any reaction. He was so confident that he didn’t need to look back. A concert pianist who required no applause. He didn’t want our admiration. He had made the big leap across his own doubts and pulled off the most brilliant performance I had ever seen. He got back into his car and drove away, leaving us behind, unable to move.
33
We drove with the light coming after us. Helen and Ellis were talking in the front seats while I stayed quiet in the back, trying to gather up what I had learned about this country and wondering if my first impressions were still valid.
The motorway seemed to take all the glory for itself, distracting from the landscape. The sun was paused behind the clouds, spreading like a cobweb across the wet fields. The light came seeping through the hedges, distributed at such a low intensity that you might have thought there were pieces of silver foil behind the trees. It felt as though we were driving through an interior space. Everything seemed so close. Smaller. Cattle and horses within reach. Hardly any shadows. Even the houses in the distance had an energy-saving sheen coming across the roofs.
There was something sad about the landscape, I thought. But it was not a question you could ask: Why is your country looking so sad right now? I assumed it had to do with the light, or the absence of light, or the absence of people, and I wondered if that was how they compensated for it, through talking and joking, through friendship.
By the time we got to Furbo in the afternoon, the sky had lifted and there were blue patches breaking through the clouds. We
walked up from the main road and came to the house where Johnny Concannon grew up. It was a two-storey cottage, now derelict. Some of the furniture was still left in the kitchen, some chairs and a rusted toaster. A sofa in the main room with an old TV lying upside down. The house had lichen growing on the front and the pink of the plaster showing through the gable walls. There was a mound of turf at the back which had become overgrown with grass. And scraggy fuchsia hedges, rigid from flinching against the constant wind off the sea. We walked around the house and Ellis said that she would love to restore it and come to live here when the baby was born. It was a good thing to say, the day after the funeral. Promising to teach her child the language left behind by her father.
We made our way down to the shore and saw the usual bits of debris lying around that were given back by the sea. I found a faded blue hemp rope wedged into a crevice between two rocks. I was like a shore-ranger, trying to lift it out. But the rope was jammed in so tightly by the force of the waves that it seemed to have taken root almost. I could not dislodge it, otherwise I would have it with me now.
We came to the beach and stood looking out for a while. There were long, parallel lines of foam drifting on top of the water. We saw the islands lit up in the distance and the ferry coming towards us, cutting through the waves. None of us spoke. We were in no hurry, watching the tide coming in around us. There were no sand-hoppers out. Only the waves spilling across the sand, carrying strips of loose seaweed, and Helen pulling Ellis by the arm to make sure her shoes didn’t get wet.
We drove to Ros a’ Mhíl to get the ferry out to Inishmore. We parked the car and walked down to the quay, the three of us, Helen and Ellis linking arms while I got the tickets. There were lots of boats docked, but only one of them sailing because it was low season and there were very few visitors left. A couple from Berlin drinking cans of beer to control the effect of the boat lurching from side to side. Some younger French people with dreadlocks and haversacks, reading a map. People from the island as well, returning from a day shopping in Galway, speaking Irish to each other and talking about some TV personalities. Helen told me that one of the men was making fun of the women. He kept saying ‘Do you know something I’ve noticed about you?’ but never actually saying what it was until the women turned their backs on him and said they didn’t care what he thought.
Hand in the Fire Page 23