Though I was taller than Grace I was just as lean and navigated the hole in the hill, that ear-like fissure, with as much ease. In fact, the opening wasn’t as narrow as it seemed, but was rather a sequence of curved obstacles, outcrops of rock, one in front of the other, hiding the ensuing tunnel in which I found myself. There had probably been a barrier of gravel and small rocks at one time, but weathering had disturbed them leaving an easily climbed low heap just past the entrance. After that there was a wide, tall tunnel that stretched ahead, going down into the hill with an easy gentle gradient.
Grace took hold of me again, wrapping her hand around my arm just below the elbow. Encouraged by her find she wanted to lead the way, convinced that this is what Abby had discovered. Seeking confinement, though, Abby would have gone deeper, no doubt until the tunnel terminated in rock, where she was probably curled up, contained by darkness. We had to go deeper, deeper and deeper, but I resisted. It wasn’t safe to go stumbling ahead in the darkness. Where we were was all right, the light through the entrance sufficient for some considerable distance, the tunnel spacious enough for a horse, but after that it was black. – We guessed the tunnel had been constructed with horses in mind. Markings where rails had been could clearly be seen, and the rock between was worn smooth from the continual tramp of hooves. We had obviously discovered a way into a disused iron-ore mine.
Once again the fact that Abby was beyond calling was indisputable. Grace was right; if this really was where Abby had gone to earth then we had no choice but to follow, and the only way to ever follow her was to go exactly where she had gone, to follow in her footsteps, to look at what she had looked at and try to see what she had seen.
I took Grace’s hand away from my arm and held her hand to hand, confirmed sisters. We began to descend the tunnel together. The temperature began to rise. At first progress was simple. The light was weak and diffuse, but enough to see the line of the tunnel, enough not to be disoriented by the incline which appeared regular, but when the dark began to become more complete felt subject to sudden downwards jolts. As the light failed I reached out and traced my hand along the tunnel wall. It was cold and moist to touch, as if the wall was drenched in sweat. Occasionally I stepped into ruts which were filled with water. I felt all of the time that I was going to strike my head against a ridge of rock, an outcrop, a decline in the tunnel’s capacity, something hanging from the roof. The darkness became physical, solid. I held Grace’s hand more tightly, and was sure she squeezed mine at the same time.
I don’t know how long we had been descending, perhaps minutes, perhaps only seconds, when Grace stumbled over a rut and fell. Due to the tightness of our grip I kept hold of her, but she jerked me to the side so that I ended up on my knees in front of her. I reached out with my free hand to touch her. She was sprawled out. I could feel the heavy contractions of her chest. She was evidently sobbing. I couldn’t hear her. My hearing aid wasn’t working. Maybe it was wet, or had been damaged in the fall. I strained to hear. I crawled over her, coming closer, bringing my ear to her. Eventually I heard her sobs, her broken moans, helplessly crying to go home. It sounded as if through water, bubbling in my ear, at first shapeless, meaningless, but then as if thrown into relief by sudden shafts of light, giving up meaning, a sob, a word, a word with a picture, a word with a desire. I – want – to – go – home.
I stroked her. I stroked her with my two hands, running them across her chest, down her side and across her back, outlining her shape, giving her substance and form in the darkness, confirming I was there and that it was going to be all right. Still the bubbles of her distress formed in my mind. At that moment I heard Abby’s name. It was a dull note, repeated over and over though it was impossible to say from where it came. I was convinced it was coming from Grace. I rubbed her more vigorously, rubbed her to take away the pain of Abby’s name; but then it came from somewhere else, somewhere in the dark, though I couldn’t say from where. The darkness was everywhere, eluded shape and pattern. It was unmistakably Abby’s name, though, unmistakably Abby. She was full of it, bursting with it. It was as rich and sonorous as laughter. I don’t think I had ever heard her as excited as she was in that moment, and then I felt her hands clutch for me in the dark. As soon as she made contact her voice burst out in a great peal of excitement. I heard it, heard it as clearly as if I was not Grade II deaf at all.
Straight away I felt her hands covering me, rapidly forming my fallen outline in the dark. I felt her face close to mine, so close it was as if she were sniffing me, Grace and me, confirming it was indeed her sisters, and then she began to coax and encourage, her hands gently pulling, persuading me back to my feet. She lifted me and I lifted Grace and we stood bound together, not hand in hand, nor linked, but my arm wrapped around Grace, Grace’s hand clutching my skirt, Abby’s two palms resting on my shoulders, her face close to mine, her excited breaths against my cheek.
It was Abby who took the first steps, deciding the direction out of the darkness. We shuffled forward as if walking were a problem, though no bones had been broken. Grace hadn’t been wailing in physical pain, just fear and the desire for home. Every second I expected to walk straight into a wall, or find the tunnel closing all around us at the face of some last unmined vein: but my fears were groundless. Abby never wavered. She knew exactly how to manoeuvre through that space. After all, she was in her element. Why should it have been such a surprise? Really, the only surprise was that she was willing to relinquish it for the sake of her sisters. I could see it in her expression as she brought us into the light, the disappointment, the reluctance. Already she was quite the subterranean creature, her face smeared red with ore. Even in the dull light that began to gather around us it was clear that her paleness had a new tincture, not robustness but stain. As the light increased it became obvious that her hands too were thick with the orange-red ore. I could only wonder at the thoroughness of it, and imagine her joyfully tracing the contours of her confinement, running her hands across the sodden walls then excitedly all over herself, though whether she realised the transfer or not I don’t know. I tend to think she did, she carried it so much like war paint.
When we finally reached the entrance I had to promise that we would come back soon in order to get her to leave. In fact I had to explain it would still be there and that it couldn’t be taken away. It was a difficult explanation.
Rock, earth, dug out, forever.
Hole, forever.
Forever.
I remember thinking she was kidding me. It never occurred to me that she might not live in time, that yesterday, today and tomorrow were indivisible; but in reality where was the change or the alteration that could have alerted her to the possibility of it? I should have seen the way they had taken time from her and known the gift one sister can give to another is to return it, accepting that as with many gifts there is a cost. In time things will end, will be drawn to a close, but time cannot distinguish between those things we would want to have terminated and those we would want to have survive. That is the chance we take. That is why we have to sign, because we know time is everything we have to contend with, my time, Grace’s time, Abby’s time; but time wasn’t on her face, not then. She must have been sure she had found the door that went right through it, the door she had been looking for for so long, and it was her sister that told her it was time to go.
Grace was all for leaving her. She indicated her coloured face, her filthy clothes, suggesting she was safer where she was. What would Harold make of his red-skin child, other than to use it as another reason to disown her, claim she was unnatural, not a Sempie at all but an impostor, a deaf, red-skin cuckoo. When I frowned my disapproval Grace shrugged and said Abby would follow anyway, once she realised she was alone, there was no point fighting with her. I wasn’t sure though. I believe she would have stayed there forever, and who would have come looking for her? It would have been left to later generations to dig her up, an artefact, a Grade III deaf girl, buried without apparent ritual
or crime – her bones yielding no evidence, her skin long gone – sometime in the uncertain decade following the Second World War. What story would they invent to explain her, certainly not one that would do her justice, one that would tell of the look she had in her eyes, the look she had when she gazed at the horizon, a witness.
I promised we would come back and explore every gallery; up and down we would go until we had made the whole mine ours, hers.
I had her laughing, jumping, calling her name, shaking out a perfectly neat war dance in her ochre war paint.
Grace said we couldn’t take her back looking like that. I had to agree. So, once again we washed her, this time in fresh water, not salt water, in the v shaped pool, though it was every bit as cold, and despite the fact that unlike salt water it didn’t leave the skin taut and still unclean, it wasn’t sufficient to remove all the redness from her. Grace said she was being stubborn, without even trying to explain how she might affect that trick. After that we climbed inside the segmented creature. Along the ridge of the tube there were occasional portholes large enough to allow us access. A shallow, rainbow streaked stream ran across the floor, but it was easy to stride along with our feet to either side. We ran first to the far end where the stream was at its narrowest, then down the whole length, until the water was too much and we would have had to wade into it. At that point we climbed out and found we were someway out into the pond. So the creature was an island in the middle of a flood, a boat, an elephantine saviour.
If it wasn’t for the mine we might have found Abby inside the creature rather often after that, though it would never have become an entirely favoured place because the water stopped her lying down. She always knew asylum was a place in which she could lie down comfortably.
It was Grace who solved the mystery. The creature was the remains of the drainage system of a subsided and subsequently flooded iron-ore mine. Her father, Seamus, told her, but whether he expected her to remember is doubtful.
*
Why is that we pity the past but fear the future? Is that really reconcilable?
The past, the near past, the far past, the past we remember, the past we calculate, is invariably considered a more innocent time than the one we are in. We scoff at an Anglo Saxon world that only knew spaghetti in tins, detested garlic and, when pushed, drank sweet German wine, much preferring beer and gin. Our sophistication is global – though presumably there are tastes yet to be unearthed.
We trek every path from the Arctic to Antarctica. The globe is a toy, something to brag about, to encounter in a package deal if necessary, independently when at all possible. Technological superiority proves the case. The modern world is complex, refined, peopled by a global tribe. The old world was a grey world, a world of floral patterned embossed wall-paper, shampoo and set women, wife beating men. We’ve outgrown all that, all the fights that were the wrong fights, the emergencies and whims which were, in the clear light of hindsight, so trivial after all, and, it goes without saying, we’ve said goodbye to ridiculous fashions.
My hairdresser has had quality training. She knows all there is to know about hair, what makes it rich, what makes it take colour, its patterns of growth. She knows what the old world did not, that hair is a specialist subject worthy of study, and if one scrimps on study then the customer will recognise you are trying to palm them off with an inferior product. There is no one as worldly-wise as the modern customer, the expert, democratic consumer.
So why is it that the innocent world will not leave me alone? Why does it cry out for a vengeance that it feels I am adequate to give? Perhaps because progress has taught me that there is no straight line from innocence to knowing, but endless spirals, curvatures, loose ends.
Of course, my vanity knows no end, my infectious young hairdresser is well aware of that mundane fact.
What does progress mean to a deaf person, to me, to Grace, Abby: hearing or respect?
Chapter Eight
I went to see Agnes. She had the same worried, put upon look she always had, but she had more weight and was neater than I had ever known her, her clothes cheap but not unfashionable – a flowery dress and turquoise cardigan with mother-of-pearl buttons. Her hair, now dyed copper brown, had been set in a tight perm which made it appear as if it had shrunk around her head. Her skin was markedly more aged, patterned over with numerous fine lines. She had been a heavy smoker all her life, it was a smoker’s face, the face I was destined to have; faces we had so rashly contributed to.
Straight away she told me he was out and didn’t know how long he would be.
‘‘No,’’ I said. ‘‘I know, I saw him go. It’s you I came to see.’’
‘‘Me,’’ she said, smiling faintly, nervously, ‘‘why would you want to see me? I’m sure I’ve got no interesting news.’’
I smiled. ‘‘Everyone keeps assuming what I’ll be interested in, what I’m not interested in. I was keen to know there’s still a meat van, a butcher.’’
‘‘But you’re in London now.’’
I shrugged.
‘‘He told me, told me you’d been away, wondered if I knew, and he said you were in London now.’’
‘‘Did he approve?’’
She looked confused. ‘‘He doesn’t mind.’’
‘‘No.’’
‘‘You don’t want to know about the butcher’s van. What would you want to know?’’
‘‘Everything.’’
‘‘Why? I don’t get what you’re after.’’
‘‘So I’m not shocked one day to find everything gone. Just to keep pace.’’
‘‘But you’re in London now. He told me.’’
‘‘It doesn’t mean I’m not interested.’’
‘‘There’s nothing to interest you here, there’s nothing here, nothing for you, that’s why you’ve gone, isn’t it, because there’s nothing here, that’s why anybody goes, and who’d blame them.’’
‘‘I’d be interested to know if there wasn’t a butcher’s van anymore.’’
‘‘But that’s just laughing at people. That’s not real.’’
The colour momentarily drained from her face, and she eyed me with cold curiosity. It was unexpected, suggested depths I ignored to my own cost. Agnes was made up of shades, compromises, learnt strategies. I was in error. I actually felt a pang of fear. It was unmistakable. Agnes would not countenance games. The set of her face indicated it. She was signing a warning.
‘‘No, I’m sorry,’’ I insisted, ‘‘I am interested. I don’t want to find I don’t know here, don’t know it at all.’’
Her expression changed, the transition imperceptible but real, and she looked sulky and beaten again. ‘‘There’s nothing to interest you here.’’
I shrugged, signing my disagreement, not insisting on it, insinuating. Something like a smile passed her face, but it was as if smiling had become so unusual an act for her that she no longer knew how to fully affect the trick.
‘‘Do you want to come in?’’ she asked, her tone matter of fact, neither encouraging nor discouraging.
I shrugged again, accepting if it was no inconvenience, no bother, and sat down, resuming my place in that new room, with the rose covered wallpaper and fitted carpet. Of course, she meant sit down, because I was already in, just crossing the threshold meant one was in. She didn’t offer me tea. She wasn’t prepared to go that far. She did offer me a cigarette, but it was an afterthought, after she had lit her own and taken a number of quick, deep drags.
‘‘No, thanks,’’ I said, ‘‘I’m trying to give up, think I should give up.’’
‘‘I’ve thought of that,’’ she said, taking long inhalations, relishing the pleasure for my sake, ‘‘but Harold likes a smoke, his Players, untipped, so there’d be no point.’’
‘‘You do a lot for him.’’
‘‘What do you smoke? What do they smoke in London?’’
‘‘I said you do a lot for him, a lot of what he wants.’’
‘‘I
bet it’s not Players and Woodbines in London, and I suppose they’re all tipped.’’
‘‘Rothmans, I smoke Rothmans.’’
‘‘Never heard of them,’’ she said wistfully, disappointed.
‘‘Don’t suppose you had much choice then, back then, women had to buckle down.’’
‘‘I just got on with it, Judith, that’s what I’ve always done, got on with it. That’s how I am.’’
‘‘You’re right, they’re all tipped.’’
‘‘Leave me one. I’d like to try a …?’’
‘‘Rothmans.’’
‘‘Rothmans.’’
‘‘Changing religion is more than just getting on with it.’’
‘‘I don’t know about that.’’
‘‘I would say it is. Most people would say it is.’’
The colour left her face again, replaced by sternness. It didn’t flash across her face, but was apparent in just a turn of her head, two tendencies lying side by side.
‘‘My mother just got on with it as well,’’ I said, ‘‘always proud they never drew the dole.’’
‘‘I never changed religion.’’
‘‘But going to mass, the children.’’
‘‘I said I never changed religion. You don’t just change religion. That would be a difficult thing. I didn’t do a difficult thing.’’
‘‘So, you’re Catholic.’’
‘‘Of course I’m Catholic, what do you think?’’
‘‘Good, a good Catholic?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
The lines tightened across her expression, her smoker’s face contracting, the colour squeezed, becoming increasingly meagre, nevertheless I chanced it. It was what I was there for, to chance things, chance light and dark, hubris and a fall. The opposite would have been to accept decline, insignificance, charity. I could only suppose my own smoker’s face, not yet properly reformed, was as ash-grey as hers.
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