The Dead House

by Billy O'Callaghan

  ‘It’s beautiful here, but kind of lonely.’ She glanced at me. ‘Don’t you think?’

  I said I did.

  ‘I could be happy in a place like this, but I’d need to have someone to share it with me. Imagine coming down onto this beach in the dead of winter, some dark morning in November with a gale blowing and these waves swollen waist-high, lashing the shore. I don’t think I could stand to be here for that. Not on my own.’

  ‘Maggie has had enough of people,’ I said. ‘She thinks she needs the isolation. I don’t happen to agree with her, but I understand why she wants to get away. Her plan is to paint here, to get some real work done, and at least on her own she can’t get hurt. She’s been hurt enough already.’ But I looked around and knew exactly what Alison meant, because I could feel it, too. The summer morning was a disguise, a delusion.

  For now, though, it was pleasant to walk. And I was more content than I’d thought possible, simply getting to share this time with a woman like Alison. I tried not to dwell on it, or make more of it than it likely was, but I gave myself permission to enjoy these minutes, knowing well just how fleeting the state of happiness can be. We chose to follow the shoreline south-westward, because the cliffs rose in that direction and the outcroppings of rock ensured we couldn’t go very far. That morning, I think, there was an unspoken need for boundaries. And with the ceaseless press of the ocean on our right I had a sense of having arrived at the edge of the world. There were no sounds beyond the gentle rushing of the waves and the steady crunch of our steps, and I only talked because Ali asked me questions, mainly to do with business, about work I’d recently sold and new work not yet finished but which already had me excited and might, if the price could be right, perhaps excite her, too. And then it was her turn, and she talked, of her own accord, about the pros and cons of living in Dublin, the theatres, the traffic, the increase in gang crime, the inner city’s struggle to retain some tradition against the yuppified posturing and hard currency brag of the recent economic upturn, and the anomalous markets and old pubs that still abounded with Joycean characters, mock Georgian in everything but the loud swagger of their accents. She mentioned, too, without meeting my eye, that she’d been married, briefly, a hundred years ago, one of those eight-month mistakes that twenty-year-old girls sometimes make. A juvenile politico named Laurence, who talked endlessly of saving the world but who, it soon turned out, modelled the term ‘selfish bastard’ at professional catwalk level. Ready at a moment’s notice wherever a placard could get him seen, anti-everything except spending other people’s money, fawning over anyone who might conceivably buy him drink and crawling into bed with anyone in panties. Her mother had warned her, of course, everyone had, but at that age she could hear nothing beyond the singing of the birds. And then, one morning, after she’d just hung up on the umpteenth of his sluts, the clouds parted. When he woke, maybe an hour later, she had all of his belongings bagged and packed. Her stepfather stepped in, dealt with the paperwork and with a little money and a lot of menace made it all official, and she hadn’t seen Laurence in something like twelve years and never wanted to see him again. The last she heard, he’d washed up in America, probably found himself some masochist with cash to burn who’d happily tolerate his brand of honeydew horseshit.

  Ahead of us, the low cliffs pressed in and the beach narrowed and was eventually cut off by outcroppings of staggered reef. I caught movement and raised a hand to shield my eyes from the glare, but for the next few seconds the world was still.

  ‘There’s someone there,’ I said, uncertain why the words troubled me. My voice was calm but unsteady. I cleared my throat.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Up ahead. On the rocks. A woman, I think. A girl.’

  We stopped and stared. The reefs were dark layers in the near distance.

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Movement. A girl, I think. With long dark hair, wearing something white. One of those glimpses that you catch when you’re not really looking.’

  She stared, and so did I.

  ‘I don’t see anything now.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Could it have been a gull? Or the spray of a wave? I know it’s calm but the water can really kick up when it hits a reef.’

  ‘It looked like a person. A girl. She was just standing on the rocks, watching the distance. Just for half a second. There and then gone.’

  Alison considered the reefs a moment longer, then shrugged. ‘Probably one of the locals, out gathering periwinkles. We used to collect them ourselves, when we were kids. My sister Helen and I. My father would take us out to Wexford for a couple of weeks every summer. We had relatives in a village along the northern Hook, just outside of a place called Fethard-on-Sea. Two of my father’s sisters and an old woman who was either an aunt or a great-aunt of his. There was a pub called Conan’s in the village that would take all the cockles and periwinkles they could get. The owner’s wife used to pot them. At that age, I had no taste for them, though I wouldn’t hesitate now, but I remember that the tourists couldn’t get enough and would eat them straight from jars, set in clarified butter. Good for the soul, everyone said, though probably not the heart.’ She slipped an arm inside the crook of my elbow. ‘Come on, Mike. Let’s go back. I think I could go some breakfast now.’

  When we returned to the cottage, the others were up. Liz, cradling a huge cream and red polka-dot mug of steaming black coffee, sat at the kitchen table with her knees drawn up beneath her chin and her eyes limited to reluctant slits. Maggie stood at the stove, frying bacon and sausages, barefoot and bare-legged in just an oversized grey T-shirt and a pair of pink, childishly modest panties that revealed themselves to the eye whenever she had need to reach for something. Her smile for us as we entered was full of insinuation, and we let it go without the least acknowledgement because there was nothing to be said. I sat down across from Liz, and Alison poured us both coffee from the pot and then took the seat beside me. The door had been propped open to my left to let in the air of the morning and in case anyone wanted to smoke, and from my place I could see down along the path we’d just taken, and the strip of shore dull in the distance against the shining water. But the reefs lay out of view. I told myself that what I’d glimpsed was nothing, my imagination stoked by a trick of the light, yet it bothered me.

  ‘How was the beach?’ Liz asked, addressing neither one of us in particular.

  Alison smiled. ‘Lovely. A bit cool down by the water at this hour, but lovely for a walk.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful morning,’ I said, then seemed to cut myself off.

  Alison glanced at me. ‘Mike thought he saw something on the rocks.’

  ‘Not something. Someone. A girl, I think. Have you noticed anyone around here the last few weeks, Maggie?’

  She turned from the stove, thought about it, then shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. The workmen, of course. I probably just didn’t take any notice. But there are houses around, and it’s an easy walk to the village. No one owns the beach so I suppose there’ll always be people passing by. You probably saw one of the neighbours. I’ve not really met anyone yet, except to say hello to a few in the village. But curiosity is part of the fabric of rural areas, isn’t it? Especially with kids. Someone new moves in, they want to see. Now, who’s having eggs, and how many?’

  *

  The day was a good one. Following a lazy breakfast, we queued for a turn in the shower, then piled into one car and set off to explore the peninsula. Maggie insisted on driving, and because Alison and I had the back seat to ourselves, and even though we sat quite properly apart from one another, the rear-view mirror was almost constantly active. I found it difficult to ignore such scrutiny without smiling or being annoyed, but Ali didn’t even seem to notice. And, really, the landscape demanded the bulk of our attention. All around, the ground flowed in tumultuous order, a cascade of the wildest washed-out greens torn and split by jutting flashes of slate and limestone, hills and valleys away fr
om the coastline, mountainsides sheer and striped in gorse, looking naked and somehow foreign, denied their usual pretence of softness by the clear and cloudless late morning. And always, everywhere, sealing in the picture, ocean. The shower had revived Liz, or at least succeeded in blunting the sharpest edges of her hangover, and she sat half-turned in the passenger seat and kept us entertained with a constant supply of talk, a passionate deluge of fairy tales and famine stories. Then, producing from her rucksack a badly browned and dog-eared paperback, she began to read for us some of the old poems attached to the blood and stone of this area, prayers and laments for men gone to sea or loved ones to America, presenting them first in their translated state and then, even though she was far from fluent but just so that we could hear the proper music of their rhymes and feel something of their aching melancholy, in the original Irish. And almost as an aside, she began to talk of the ancients. History haunted the present in places like this, she said, places that existed at a hard remove from the rest of the world, and the incessant closeness of so much storied past tended at times to skew the definition of reality.

  Her poetry had always strived for some of that mythological and elemental flavour, but since returning to Ireland, and particularly since settling here in West Cork, she’d immersed herself in the ancient texts with intent towards writing an epic poem based on a piece of local lore. For thousands of years, she explained, dating from the earliest settlements and on through into the seventeenth century, Ireland had existed as a clan society obedient to a system of Brehon Law. High kings ruled from Tara, the royal seat in County Meath, but their control was rarely better than tenuous and the general consensus now accepted that the true power in each region almost certainly lay with the clan heads, the local chieftains. Liz had written long poems before, but nothing on such a grand scale, and, two years in, it still felt as if she’d barely broken the skin of the thing. But that didn’t matter. Having finally released herself from thoughts of ever finishing, she was now, artistically speaking, exactly where she wanted to be: content within the beat of the work and learning, step by stumbling step, to walk on air.

  ‘When studying the Irish, particularly the ancient Irish, it’s important to understand that the only absolutes are the ocean and the sky. And when the rains come, even those definitions are lost. History here is a stew of fact and fable. Each is inseparable from the other, and trying to sift them apart is like trying to remove butter from toast. To get any feeling for it at all, you have to cede a place to magic.’

  Beyond my window, the water glistened in a way that held and hurt my eyes, and I tried to imagine, as I often did in moments like these, what an artist might look for in such a scene, what details or precisions they’d catch that I would normally miss. Everything about the world ahead of me was colour – subtle shades shared out among the tumbling fields and flashes of shoreline, the rocks, waves and sky – and that, I knew, was a glimpse of magic, too, and an acknowledgement of my own failings. Because the water was blue, but not blue, it was grey, or green or a kind of burnt silver that seemed far beyond the scope of something as simplified as paint. It was all of those, and none of them, and only the right sort of eye could see, and recognise, and understand. As usual, I was seeing it as I tended to see everything: in too simplified a way. As usual, I was blind to the depths and stories of the world.

  At Maggie’s suggestion, we stopped, a little after noon, in Castletownbere, a small, bustling town with a busy harbour, and a beautiful place to be in the sunshine. Glad to escape the confines of the car, we strolled through the streets, stopping often so that the women could browse in the tourist shops, handle the roughly carved blackthorn walking sticks, select postcards from the racks and take turns trying on the flat tweed caps that filled them with delight and simply demanded to be bought.

  From there, we lunched on toasted sandwiches and Beamish in one of the pubs at the top of the main street, Houlihan’s, a purposely dark, cool place trying hard to act ten times its age, the exposed beams, bare stone walls and sawdust on the floor seeming so much the very definition of traditional that it was difficult not to entertain just the slightest scepticism. Still, the food was good and the stout even better. I had a pint and then a second, Alison and Liz showed restraint with glasses, and Maggie, our driver, had to tolerate an orange juice and made no effort to hide her disappointment. Across the room, an extremely old man and what looked to be his grandson or even his great-grandson, a boy of no more than about ten, played solemn, stumbling reels on fiddles burnished by firelight, oblivious to everyone and everything except one another and the music.

  When we left the pub, a little after two o’clock, the day had deepened. The air seemed golden, and calm. We walked back to the harbour, close to where we’d parked, and idled for a while watching the cars in a long, pent-up line take turns at reversing, with considerable difficulty, down a steep ramp and onto the deck of a small ferry. Tourists from one of the several parked coaches milled about in packs, mostly middle-aged or elderly, American by their accents and ambitiously dressed in knee-length shorts and sandals, but some kids too, teenagers, thin-looking boys stoic behind blacked-out shades and smiling Japanese girls busily snapping pictures of the boats, one another and the huge gulls unfurling for the sky, images that probably felt essential to the moment but which would mean less than little in the colder light of a month’s or a year’s perspective.

  Rather than returning the way we’d come, Maggie started the car east, towards Adrigole. The light thickened further and every detail of the landscape seemed heightened. The ocean on our right fell into shades of cobalt and then sky. A fatigue set in, one of those summer lulls that can make simply breathing enough, and we sat at our respective windows, gazing out at the shapes and colours of the world, no one saying much, no one really even thinking. At Adrigole we turned north off the main road and followed a narrow byroad up through the Healy Pass between the Slieve Miskish and Caha Mountains, stopping near the summit in a small, chipped-gravel parking area so that we could fully savour the views.

  I’ve been many places in my life, but the Healy Pass felt like we’d somehow strayed into another world. Wildness lay in every direction, something equal parts fearful and sublime, the kind of raw that made my blood itch. Layers of rugged granite mountainside, the casual filthy-white scatter of sheep flecking the distance, the tumbling ground a desperation of greenery, thick as pond-scum in parts, stewed to the colour of sand by sun and wind along the higher reaches, clogging the channels between the domineering rock.

  Only Alison had thought to bring a camera, and she had us pose on the roadside, individually and then in various combinations, with the landscape spread out behind us. When it was her turn to stand with me, Maggie took over the camera and directed that we move closer, that Ali put her arm around my shoulder and I put mine around her waist. I have two copies of that photograph, our first together. One, enlarged to ten inches by twelve, hangs in our hallway. The other I keep tucked in my wallet. We appear so happy, comfortable in one another’s company and so young. I see that more and more as time passes. Alison, slight beside me, looks beautiful in that simple pale blue cotton summer dress that shows off her shoulders and makes the world of her shape, and I seem fit and healthy, strong, in jeans and an old check-patterned shirt with the sleeves tucked to my elbows. We are looking at the camera and smiling but with a certain evident impatience, as if the photograph is costing us a precious second instead of preserving it forever. We had no way of knowing then that we’d get to share years of the life left to us, but that probably didn’t stop us hoping. I think, though, that in the moment, as full to bristling with life as that moment was, all notion of a future seemed beyond us. There was then, and there was what had gone before. The rest was dreams.

  I could not have imagined a more perfect afternoon. Looking back, because of the dense nature of the light and, even more so, the way in which time seemed to turn in on itself, it had the quality of a delusion, too idyllic to be true.
We had whole other lives spinning around us, demanding our attention, but I felt removed, shielded from all of that and safe in the company I’d found. Alison felt the same, I think. I can remember the way the air tasted, and the feel of her body warm beside me and so alive through the cotton of her dress, so full of a beating heart. We were sharing some essence of ourselves, and I only know that it was as good as I’d felt in the longest time.

  The road down the other side of the pass was slow and full of folds, each turn opening up the land below and ahead of us to a different and unexpected view. We continued on to Lauragh, where we once more met the ocean, then followed the coastline west again to Allihies. The day felt compressed, and we watched the landscape from the rolled-down windows and talked in low, disconnected voices, making easy, pleasant conversation as a way to help pass the miles. Broaching subjects of little consequence: the most famous people we’d met, our favourite films and film stars, the five albums we couldn’t live without, the five songs that best defined us as people, as if songs alone could do that. Liz revealed an affection for the medieval strangeness of Pentangle and Steeleye Span, and songs like ‘Gaudete’; Maggie claimed to have seen Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones in one of the duty-free shops at Heathrow, though she’d been too shy to approach him for an autograph; and Alison surprised us by offering Smokey and the Bandit as her all-time favourite film, not because she considered it the greatest ever made – though it had, she said, an undeniable and for her irresistible charm – but because of how much pleasure it had given her father. He’d died of a brain haemorrhage when she was young, just seven years old, and she could recall little about him but had a vivid memory of huddling up beside him on the couch and feeling shivers of happiness at the sound and raw vibration of his laughter whenever Jackie Gleason hit the screen. She cried whenever she watched it now, she said, laughing with embarrassment at having revealed more of herself than she’d intended, and she nodded in acknowledgement of my attention and then turned her face away and set to studying the passing hillsides.