by Donal Ryan
From a Starless Night
I PUT ON MY running gear this morning early and went downstairs and out the door and started to run. The landlord was smoking a fag outside his shop, facing away from me. I crossed the road to avoid talking to him. Murty is sound but I knew he was waiting there for news, for the story. I couldn’t face it. His shop-girls would have told him there was something up. They’d have seen the leaving through the window yesterday, the comedy of boxes and baling twine.
I went slowly at first. Under the birdsong, through the fumeless breeze, past the Lidl that was once the Davin Arms where we’d meet and pretend to be strangers; past the deathly whitewashed front of Ivan’s where we used to go to buy posh bread and wine; past the tyre place and the garage and the Limerick Inn hotel where I used to work weekends washing dishes when we were in college and she’d always ring me when the kitchen hummed the most and all the chefs would roll their bleary eyes and chop and clang harder in temper; past the roundabouts and traffic lights and onto the shoulder of the motorway, into the clean and still and misty countryside, into the morning, the rising day.
Jenny told me the night before last that I was disconnected. We gave until the sunrise to exchanging sentences starting with I’m the one and You’re the one. I begged her but she told me all my chances were used up. Her father came to collect her yesterday morning. She left the flat bare behind her save for a hillock of tat, summited by the ornamental Ganesh that I bought for her in New Delhi. There’s an echo now that was never there before; all the soft, downy things are gone, there’s nothing to swallow the sounds of me. I sat on the edge of a kitchen chair in the middle of my plucked flat and blew smoke in Ganesh’s elephant face and said, Well, Ganesh, what the fuck will we do now? And he said nothing back, only sat four-armed and cross-legged and stared at me through his alabaster eyes.
I don’t like being alone in the flat. I saw a ghost one time, walking across the kitchen floor from right to left. She was wearing jeans and a long, loose shirt; her hair was long and brown, her face was pale. She lived there once, and was killed in a car crash. She was coming home, she didn’t know she was dead. I never told Jenny; it happened on a weekend night. She hardly ever stayed in the flat on weekends, she stayed in the habits of college: going home Friday evenings to her family and childhood friends, bussing it back late Sunday or early Monday. Murty’s wife called a priest she knew and he came one day when we were at work and anointed the walls and floors and whispered gently to the dead girl to walk into the light. I think she did; I haven’t seen her since. I’m still afraid she’ll come back, though, and frighten the piss out of me again.
Anyway, I am alone, and there doesn’t seem much I can do about it. I texted Jenny a few times but she hasn’t replied. Or I don’t think she has: the keys on my phone are frozen. She’s gone from me. I’m not sure exactly why, but it’s got something to do with coldness, with absence, with non-engagement. Things like that. I didn’t see this coming, though, her sudden burst of temper and tears, this exodus.
This is it, so, she said, and smiled with her lips downturned so her chin dimpled sweetly. I felt, I felt. Something new. A concentrated kind of love for her, winding me. A knowing that she wasn’t coming back. Will you be okay? Ya, ya, I’ll be grand, I said, in a whisper. She said, Hug? I just stood there so she walked over to me and put her arms around me and I stood stiff and unmoving though I hadn’t planned on being sulky and she drew away saying Oh for fuck’s sake in a weary voice and she was gone down the stairs before I looked up from the naked floor.
Her father crammed his ancient Jetta with her stuff and his big hand swallowed mine and he pumped it up and down just once and leaned in close to me and his forested nostrils flared and he jerked his head sideways towards his idling car and tear-streaked daughter and said, There’s plenty more fish in the sea, son. She’s as contrary as they come, anyway, that one. And he looked over at her, a gleam of adoration in his eyes, and he tied the lock of his boot to his tow-bar with a length of baling twine, and they were gone.
I ASKED MY mother the same questions over and over when I was small. Why have I no granny and granddad? Why do we never go on our holidays? She’d answer, a different answer every time it seemed to me, and her words would make no sense to me. I’d know from a shimmer of change in the set of her face and a coldness that would enter her eyes when to stop. I knew her so completely, so deeply. I felt the changes in the air about her, I sensed her quickening temper, her softening, the tides of her. I was besotted, obsessed; I mooned about her, I constantly wanted to touch her, to press myself into her softness. Jesus Christ, will you get out from under my feet, she’d say, and I’d crawl behind the couch and cry, and she’d lift me out and say, Sorry, little darling, sorry, my little man. And we’d sleep on the couch, curled into each other, in the long and empty afternoons.
Once, when I was four or maybe five, I made a batch of mud-men, in a wheelbarrow at the side of our house. I’d been crying over something and had lost myself in the making of them, limbless figures ranked in three files with hair of grass and features of tiny stones, and my mother said she loved them, my tiny army, they were gorgeous so they were, and so was I. She brushed my fringe back from my forehead and kissed the back of my head and my salt-stiff cheek, and I smelt fags off her, and perfume, and felt in that moment as though all the universe only existed so I could be there, beneath the sun, being kissed by her.
She’s going out with a man the last few years who used to be a farmer until he sold half his land and set the other half. Any time I meet him he turns red and the hand he offers me shakes a bit, and I feel sorry for him. How’s business? he asks. How’s things in the computer world? The finest, I say, all go. I talk the way he does to settle him, to stop him being nervous. I’m not worth being nervous over. Good, begod, he says. That’s the way to have it. Sure is, I say, and we look at each other, unsure of how to look away. Did you see the match? he asks me every time, and I lie that I did and he settles into a long analysis and the redness and uneasiness slowly recede. And I like that he’s there, for her, so I can more easily be not there, for her.
My father’s name was Finbar. I didn’t always know he was my father. He was an old man when I was a child, but tall and handsome, and he lived in a bungalow halfway up the Long Hill. He wore dark suits and smoked non-stop. He’d had a wife one time who had died. There was a picture of her in the kitchen, smiling beside the Sacred Heart. I’d be dropped at his gate and he’d answer the door with an expression of surprise, and act as though his life was completed by the sight of me. He lived three streets and a lifetime away from my mother. She’d been his secretary once, for a few months, and something had happened that led to me. He built a room on the back of his house for me, with a skylight, so I could look at the stars as I fell asleep. But all I ever saw was plain blackness. Finbar would look up at the starless night and down at me and put his hand on my face and say Sleep tight, little man. And in the mornings he’d say Come on, little man, rise up out of it. He never took me anywhere. It was years before I realized he’d been ashamed; not of me, but of the fact of my existence.
Finbar died when I was eleven and a man told me in the living room of the bungalow as I sat and stared in wonder at the stillness and smokelessness of Finbar’s corpse that he was my brother. He looked almost as old as Finbar had. He was bald and he wore glasses and his eyebrows were black and bushy and curled upwards at the ends like a cartoon devil but his face changed and seemed kind when he smiled. He told me he’d fallen out with Finbar years and years before and he’d never gotten the chance to make up with him. We had words, he said. Over you. Me? And he nodded, and then I knew, without anything more being said. Always be nice to your mother, he said. Don’t ever fall out with her. Or if you do, be sure and make it up. And I never saw that man again that said he was my brother. But someone sold Finbar’s house and my room at the back of it and I suppose it must have been him.
When I was fourteen I kicked a kitten against a
wall with all my strength. I’d been walking through the castle demesne and saw her there, standing still, crying softly. There was a wet crack when the kitten struck the wall as tiny perfect pulsing things inside her burst. The day stopped, the breeze fell away, a drifting leaf came to rest at my feet. There was nothing now that could be done to undo this thing I’d done. I turned away and walked home and my mother asked how I was as I passed her in the hallway and I ignored her as I always did in those years but I wanted to cry and beg her to make it that I didn’t kill the cat, to make the world rewind so the clenching thing inside me would loosen and fall away.
Jenny left me once before, but I knew that she’d come back that time. But just to feel our scales were balanced I went to town and walked up Pery Square and nodded at a dark-haired girl who stood with her back to the railings of the People’s Park. There was glittery makeup on her face, her green-brown eyes were blackly ringed; her breath was warm and slightly sour, her teeth were prettily gapped. I told her what I wanted and I paid her twice what she asked for and she nodded and smiled and stroked me gently until I slept and kissed my ear to wake me in the early morning. I drove her back to town in the cold dawn and dropped her near a shabby door on a passage off a lightless street. I waited to see if she’d look back at me. But she didn’t. What did I expect?
You can’t destroy energy. So every sound ever made still exists. Everything I’ve ever said is still floating through the ether, and everything that was ever said to me. I stood before a whalebone in the natural history museum once that was set on a plinth behind a screen of glass and I imagined my father was standing beside me, a made-up father, young and lean, T-shirted and muscular. The two of us marvelled, and whistled our wonder; his arm lay lightly along my shoulders. I cried at the memory of a thing that never happened. Fuck you, Finbar, I said, out loud, but no one heard. And those words are floating gently still around the universe. I hope he never hears them.
I often wondered where my mother went the nights I was in Finbar’s house. Maybe she was out, with friends, or men, being young, or maybe she just needed a break, to be alone, away for a while from my relentless love.
BUNRATTY WAS SUDDENLY behind me and I was only a downhill and an easy straight from Shannon. I wondered at my freshness, the lack of pain in my knees and ankles. I realigned my shoulders, hips and knees, and set my face to the cool breeze, and soon I was passing the empty guard box at the airport gate.
I saw a pilot on the edge of the wide path. He was smoking a cigarette, watching me approach, leaning against the metal jamb of the gate in the fence along the edge of the hangars for private jets. He was smiling at me. A black Gulfstream sat soaking sunlight on the concrete, parked at an angle from the nearest hangar, its nose cone cocked outwards almost jauntily, in a way that made it look as though it had been parked up in a hurry, like a car left on double yellows while an errand was being hastily run. I slowed to a walk as I neared him. He breathed a line of smoke skyward and said: Hello, friend. You look tired. Come and sit and have some coffee with me. And he ground his butt with a gleaming shoe and pushed himself away from his slouch and started to walk without looking back, and I followed him.
He showed me the controls of the jet, the throttle and the tiller pedals, the altimeter and trim counter and radar screen; he offered me his headpiece and his hat and roared with laughter when I put them on, and I looked across the tarmac at the distant terminal building and the viewing area where Mam and me sometimes used to go for a day out to watch the planes take off and land, and I was sure I could see two figures there looking back at me, a dark-haired man and a fair-haired child. I looked west at the glint from the water of the Shannon estuary where it lapped across the mudflats of Rineanna, and I thought how mad it was that I was here, with this sallow smiling man, and I took a small white cup of coffee from him that was haloed by wisps of steam, and he said that he was sad this day and he would tell me why.
His father had been a hotelier, a big man who laughed a lot and helped his neighbours with their problems. He turned to Mecca and prayed when he was meant to, but he was more observant than devout, a friend to all men. His father had been accused of harbouring insurgents and was taken one night and held for an autumn and winter in a prison at the edge of their town. Visits were not permitted. His father was released one cold morning and sent walking home barefoot. He was a different man, stooped, narrowed, yellowed, curled-up and dried to cracking like a fallen leaf. His eyes seemed wider in his shrunken face; they were cast down and filled with darkness. When he spoke, he addressed the ground, in a whisper, as though afraid his jailers would hear him, and take offence, and return for him. And he shrank and shrank from fear until nothing was left, and he slipped from this life without noise.
I told him in return about Finbar. Fin – bar, he said. Finbar. This is a nice name, the name of a kind man. We’re sons of the same father, he said. We’re brothers. And I noticed then a movement in a leather holdall that was sitting open on a jump-seat near the cockpit door, and a kitten poked its white head up and looked at me, and held my eye, and disappeared again into its nest. My new friend half closed the bag’s top and whispered into the darkness of it: Sleep, little fellow.
He rose and beckoned to me to follow him through the cockpit door and he looked into my eyes and smiled sadly before drawing back a curtain that was closed across the plane’s passenger area. Two men sat slumped on reclined seats, each turned to half face the other, their heads back, their throats cut. Blood was blackening on their shirts, their mouths were open in rictuses of shock, their eyes were mercifully closed. This one, the pilot said, pointing at the dead man on the left, this one is the man who lied about my father, and had him jailed, and ordered that he be starved and beaten. And this one, he said, pointing at the other dead man, was a captain in the army of liberation that came to my village and took from my family all the things needed for living.
The kitten swished suddenly past my legs and down the steps to the tarmac and disappeared. I followed it down without looking back and ran into the afternoon sun, back towards the city. I stopped at the top of my road and looked down towards the shop with our flat above it, Jenny’s and mine, and remembered myself the way I used to be, before the thunderheads rolled in. I remembered sleep unscored by dreams of falling. I prised the key from the inside of my wristband and felt a burning where it had pressed against my flesh. I opened the wooden door and went upstairs and lay along the couch and slept, and woke in the evening, in the dying light, and saw Finbar, sitting in the armchair across from me. My runners were where I’d left them the night before, unworn, waiting. My gear was still draped on the wooden kitchen chair. My blood was darkening on the floor.
Come on, my father said. You’re okay now. Rise up out of it, son, and I’ll bring you home.
Hanora Ryan, 1998
THERE’S GOING TO be war, my father said one day in 1914. Inside in Nenagh. I spied all the bould Fenians pelting off down the hill from Barbaha this morning early. Off in to roar and bawl outside the door of the Guardian office. Up in arms over recruitment posters. Not a hand’s turn done between them, I’d say. Lord but they must have great wives. There’ll be war, says he, and he shaking his head. Mark that now, ye can. Let ye not go in gawking, now, let ye not. Stay well away from all that. There’ll be lads taken to the barracks, as sure as God.
The Nenagh Guardian was that time owned and always was all along the years before by loyal subjects of their fragrant majesties beyond and Daddy said the likes of them was always minded like heifers in calf. It wasn’t until a year or two later, 1916 I’m nearly sure, that the Guardian was bought by the Ryans who own it still to this day. (No relations of mine except like as not the way all Ryans are related if you go far enough back along the ages.)
I’ll blister ye, Daddy said, if I hear of ye inside near the place. But I saw no crossness on his face as he turned away from my brothers and my sister and me, back to his foddering. As if such a thing was possible, that he’d have eve
r left a mark on one of his children. My gentle father, and he all about the war, the war.
The posters were torn down anyway and stamped into the mud and more were put up and the RIC ringed a man called Waxer Walsh and roped him and dragged him down Barrack Street and a small band of Irish Volunteers went about springing him and a man was shot in the arm and that was the finish of the hoo-hah for a good long while. But any man who went about answering the call of king and country that was printed by the Nenagh Guardian on those posters and on the front page of their newspaper was told to expect no peace or place in the Tipperary they’d return to. They’d choke on the bread the king’s shilling bought, and their families with them.
Robert Wesson Coleman was five or six years older than me. He gave many a day palling with us, only half in secret. He played hurling with my brothers above in the long acre and he showed them a rugby ball one time and their eyes widened in wonder. The quare shape of it. My sister was in love with him. I suppose I was too, but though I was younger I was less inclined to be fanciful or to be overtaken fully by such things the way Mary was. My eldest brother said he hated Rob Coleman because he was a dirty English land-robbing bastard but when we heard he’d fallen in Flanders Fields my brother went out to the barn and cried.
I read a poem years upon years later written by William Butler Yeats. Lord God it knocked the breath from my body and the words from my mind. It was about another Robert, though his name was not mentioned in the lines of the poem but in the explanation beneath, written by some professor of such things. Major Robert Gregory, the poem was presumed to be about, the son of Lady Gregory, and he for all the world by the sounds of it the very self-same as my Robert. A boy from a big house told he had a fealty and a duty to a foreign land by virtue of the blood in his body. The boy in the poem didn’t hate his enemy nor love his king; Kiltartan was his country, the poor of that place his people. That’s out there beyond Gort in County Galway. We went there for a spin one Sunday, and drove down into Coole Park to see the swans and the famous names carved into the trees. I got a terrible lonesome feeling. Your man Yeats couldn’t have known the thoughts that were in that boy’s head as he flew his fighter plane towards the heavens but my soul be damned if he was too far wrong.