She jerked awake. So easy to fall asleep in the bath to waken hours later in cold water, that most miserable of all awakenings. Cold soapy water in a strange room. She forced herself from the bath, towelled heavy limbs dry before the warm pink blur of her reflection in the misty mirror, slid between the 400-thread sheets, tipped the bedside clock face-down so that the little glowing minutes could tick by unobtrusively into the walnut veneer, and finally, after hours of sitting upright or dozing at awkward angles, neck crooked and uncomfortable, she lay absolutely, blissfully flat.
Shoulders spread, fingers loose, head resting on her pillow. She had brought it with her from home as she always did, knowing that it was ridiculous. The pillow used up half the space in her bag, but wasn’t it worth it, for this moment? Its familiar feather stuffing plumped beneath her neck, not too hard, not too soft. It was childish. She was like a baby who won’t go anywhere without its blankie. But at the moment of sleep isn’t everyone for just a few seconds a baby? It was one of the things she liked best about going to bed with a man. Not GOING TO BED with that adult business of candlelight and seduction and something sultry on the sound system, but ordinary everyday going to bed, when you were both tired and wanted simply to sleep. She loved the way a man reverted at that moment, losing years in seconds.
Paul, for instance, came to bed like a GP, jacket slung from one shoulder, tie loosened. The jacket was tossed on a chair, the tie was dragged off as if it were a garrotte, the wrist watch was placed with infinite care in the exact same spot on the bedside table. Then he walked about the room removing layers of adulthood. One pair of Ecco shoes side by side beneath the chest of drawers, one pale blue striped shirt to the laundry basket by the closet, one pair of trousers folded over a hanger. And now he was a gawky adolescent in singlet, underpants and socks, taking a pee in the bathroom then standing at the sink to brush his teeth.
And then he removed his glasses and now he was about eight years old, ruffled and unfocused.
And then he removed everything and put on his tee shirt. He had two which he wore in rotation: old tee shirts he had worn ever since they’d been together. One with Guns N’ Roses in faded lettering on the front, the other with an embroidered Tibetan eye. Neither covered his bum so he walked about switching off the lights, his penis jiggling away beneath the short hem, with all the unselfconscious confidence of a four-year-old. Bare legs and buttocks and that lovely little groove either side of the spine that men have and women don’t, and he’d climb into bed: always the left side no matter which bed they occupied, whether they slept at her flat or his. She’d put aside the book she had been reading while Paul reverted to boyhood, then they’d switch off their bedside lights and lie down, face to face, arms about one another till they were both warm and on the very tip of sleep, and then they’d roll apart. And just before he fell asleep entirely, he would rub his nose in his pillow. He would nuzzle it, and a few seconds later there would begin that soft whiffling breathing that meant he had slid into sleep.
He didn’t snore. Maddie used to sleep downstairs on the sofa with the doors shut to keep out the snoring of her first husband, who was one of those thick fleshy men run to seed after a few years playing league. When Wayne snored, windows rattled, walls trembled, deer on distant hills raised their heads in alarm. Maddie said it was a major factor in their break-up. She was near driven insane from sleep deprivation. She had never mentioned if the Man from Snowy River snored. Clare didn’t imagine there was much time for snoring, what with all the sex.
Paul did not snore. He nuzzled the pillow, which at that moment, in the deepest crevices of the cerebellum, no doubt represented his mother’s ample bosom, and settled to sleep like a baby.
Clare does not sleep like a baby. Even when she is exhausted as she is tonight, when she almost went to sleep in the bath, she finds herself after a few moments lying wide-eyed in the dark.
Nine o’clock. She relaxes her shoulders. She breathes deep and slow. She wriggles her fingers. She wriggles her toes. They respond as they should, little bony things down there in the dark beneath the duvet. Her ankles swivel, her knees flex, her head turns easily from side to side on the column of vertebrae.
Her bones, her fragile bones. Bones that are not like other people’s bones. Bones that cannot entirely be trusted. But lying in the dark she tests them and all is well.
She lies looking up in the dark, urging sleep. Only half an hour ago she was desperate for sleep but now she is wide awake. The pineal gland seems to have miscalculated and skipped a few hours back to morning alertness.
She switches on the light.
She could go over her paper once more. In twelve hours time she will be picking up her registration envelope from the table in the foyer with her name tag and her conference timetable. She has already planned the route by which she will walk there from the hotel: along Grande Parade to Washington Street and Lancaster Quay. The foyer will be crowded with the usual press of people, some of whom she will recognise from earlier conferences. There will be the usual press about the coffee urn, the usual plenary session, the usual buzz around the young and ambitious, the usual courtship of the old and eminent, the usual flirtation and argument. Her laptop sits ready on the little table by the window, primed for Powerpoint display with its cargo of images. But now is not the time for quick revision. It is always risky to revisit a paper in the hours immediately following flight. That is when it can all dissolve in her hand: what had seemed solid, irrefutable, could now look like nonsense. That is the time when it can seem an excellent idea to edit, to remove the more glaring weaknesses, and in an instant the whole thing could unravel, like that film on Frances Hodgkins she showed some students in her first term teaching. She had left the ancient projector running while she delivered a few explanatory notes and returned to the booth to find it waist deep in film tape like a heap of tangled kelp, irretrievably creased, cracked and melted where it had touched the lens. That’s what her paper would become if she were tempted to look at it now.
The damp heap of newsprint purchased from the blind man lies by her bed. She could while away the sleepless hours reading the Evening Echo.
High-profile breakfast meeting in the Hibernian Hotel discusses impending population explosion of Mallow. Latvian man discovered with forged identity papers. An in-depth investigation into the spiralling cost of outfitting a child for her First Communion, with designer white dress, jewellery, hairdo, manicure, fake tan, stretch limo for entire family to and from church, bouncy castle for the party afterward, and this year’s novelty favourite: a tiara with a remote control. When the child receives the Host, the parents press a button and the tiara lights up. Symbolic, writes the reporter, of modern Ireland where rampant commercialism and conspicuous consumerism are the new gods. Holy Extravaganza!
There are photographs of rows of local children clutching awards for history projects and silver football trophies. And Eileen Donnelly of Donoughmore cutting the cake with the assistance of her youngest great-grandchild, Sam Bradford, at the celebration of her ninety-fifth birthday, family clustered about the matriarch, glasses raised to toast a long life lived to the full. There are reports of local crime: a car damaged with a lump hammer in Ballincollig; a taxi driver from Dromahane discovered by the Gardai with a replica gun down the front of his trousers, a baton in one hand and three Jack Russells on a leash, on his way to seek retribution for a slight incurred while driving a passenger from the airport. There are Anniversary of Death notices, each in its own black frame, with a photograph of the deceased and a tender awkward rhyme (Along the road of suffering, You found a little lane, That took you up to heaven, And ended all your pain. Always remembered). There are pages of planning permissions, illustrated real estate and Detached Residence of the Week. (New-build with sea views and southerly aspect. A development of homes built to 5-star standard with designer interiors, Italian kitchens and underfloor heating …)
There is a different style to the reporting, a closer attention to det
ail than she is accustomed to, a more personal tone of outrage or jaunty delight in absurdity than the Press at home would indulge in its reporters. She looks at a lineup of councillors and public notables with round pink faces gleaming in a hotel foyer and that is foreign too. New Zealand newspapers don’t line people up like that. The New Zealand photographer is on the lookout for the inadvertent moment: the politician asleep at the desk, the sports hero giving the finger. Or the artfully constructed scenario: the author of the railway history lying prone on the tracks.
She sits up in bed, fingers smudged with printer’s ink, wondering when newspapers back home began doing that instead of lining up notables in the hotel foyer. She turns the pages of this damp foreign world and there’s a whole page about a man called Thomas Kent who was shot in Belfast Prison during the War of Independence and whose grave can no longer be found in the prison yard. Belfast Martyr Can’t Get State Funeral Over Plot Confusion. There is a blurred photo of him, hands bound, head up, marching with his brother and four British soldiers over the bridge at Fermoy in May 1916. Just a shot taken from an awkward angle, but it is enough: something to do with that war, that poem they learned back at school. A terrible beauty is born … something something … changed utterly. She can’t remember the rest. There’d been a song as well, hadn’t there? Something about bean rows and honey bees …
She is in a foreign country. This room may be familiar enough, but beyond it, out there in the dark and the rain, everything is strange.
She gets up, her legs too jittery to lie still. She walks about the room, has a pee in the bathroom with its white towels and olive oil soap. She sits on the loo, confronting the usual relentless floor-to-ceiling mirror positioned so that close personal scrutiny cannot be avoided. A woman sits opposite, her nightie bunched about hips that could do with losing a few inches. She has dark hair cut in a plain bob, and skin that is not bad for a woman of her age though beginning to wrinkle at the corners of mouth and eyes. Her legs are tanned but not slender. She will never, as her sister said, have slender legs. She sits beneath the usual dazzling array of ceiling lighting fixtures wondering when it was deemed necessary to fold the toilet paper into an arrow point. She sits thinking about this long day.
April 20.
It is April 20, and it has been his birthday for hours and hours. Somewhere nearby, he may at this very moment be celebrating his ninetieth birthday, surrounded by friends and perhaps family. There might be a photo for the paper. A toast to a long and happy life! Some gaps, of course, in Michael Lacey’s life, some little niggling doubt about where he might have got to for eight years or so back in the fifties. But that’s long gone. A toast! A toast to Mick! Ninety today! God bless him! Sláinte!
She has remembered the date despite herself, as she remembers it every year. She remembers the cake for tea, with the candles from the tin in the kitchen drawer, all striped and skirted with dribbled wax and a tiny tutu of dried icing from all the other birthday cakes, and how she was allowed to poke the candles into the icing in a circle. Not one for every year because her father was much too old for that. The whole cake would be covered in flame. But enough to blow out and make a wish. She remembers the cake, and the presents wrapped in bits of the wallpaper he had used to paper the sitting room: a cream embossed paper that folded stiffly over the gifts they had bought him. A handkerchief from Maddie, socks from their mother, a picture from Brian which he had drawn himself of a boy on a yellow boat. She had bought her father coloured pencils for that last birthday, using the Christmas half crown they each received every year from Mr Moses.
She had wanted the pencils the minute she saw them on the shelf in the dairy, alongside the school exercise books and writing pads. They were beautiful: brilliant red and green and blue, in a little cardboard box with a picture of a lake and hills on the front. She knew he would like them best, though Maddie said it was silly to buy pencils when he had heaps of pencils already.
But she had put them beside his teacup on the table, wrapped in the stiff embossed paper, and waited for him to open the gift after they had sung Happy Birthday.
‘Happy Birthday!’ they sang, as their father tore off the wrapping and was surprised by each present in turn. ‘Happy Birthday to you!’ He had pinned Brian’s drawing on the wall under his own picture that was framed as proper pictures should be and hung above the dining table. The boy set sail in a sunny yellow boat waving along a blue line of ocean beneath their father’s pencil sketch of a farmhouse like the houses in story books: a proper dolls’ house with two storeys and a door in the middle and a yard in front with barns on either side and a well like the wishing well at the Botanical Gardens, where a little girl in a raggy dress was leading a donkey. He had hugged Maddie and pretended to blow his nose on her handkerchief, then folded it away in his pocket, saying every sniff would remind him of her. He had put the socks on right away. And at last he had opened the box of pencils.
‘I chose them myself,’ Clare said, because Maddie hadn’t really chosen the handkerchief herself at all. Their mother had chosen it and given it to Maddie to be her present. ‘I knew you’d like them.’
‘I do, I do,’ he had said. ‘These are the very best pencils. They’re top pencils. You chose well.’ And he ruffled her hair, the way he did when he was pleased with her. She had leaned against his side, knowing he had liked her present best.
Red and green and blue in their box. He had left them behind when he disappeared. She had found them weeks later in the sideboard drawer where their mother put the bills to wait till the numbers on the front had ripened to a rich berry red. There was her box with the lake and hills on the front and its bright pencils, still sharp and unused. She had tried them by scribbling on the phone book, expecting the same beautiful colour. A glowing red. A deep marine blue. A bright green like willows in spring. A black as black as night.
They didn’t work. The lead traced a pallid line on the paper, a pale hint of red and blue and green nothing like their brilliant promise. So she snapped them, one by one, and they broke like the wishbone on a roast chicken, leaving a ragged edge behind. She snapped them all, put them back in the box, then when their mother wasn’t watching, preoccupied with plastering tar ointment onto Brian’s scaly legs, she dropped them into the range. They flared up, and the air smelled of pine resin for a few seconds. Then they were gone. She closed the little iron door.
Happy Birthday, she thinks, sitting up in bed, considering coloured pencils as the traffic slaps by outside on a wet night, and there is that curious muted European rain instead of the bold rattle drum of rain on the corrugated-iron roofs of home. The minutes on the bedside clock tick into the walnut veneer, repeating minutes she has lived already.
She could read the paper.
She could go to sleep.
She could …
She could make a phone call. There is a phone by the bed. She can consult the Eircom directory. It is not too late. Those cars that leapt away from the lights will only now be pulling into driveways in the places in the real-estate advertisements. In Kinsale, Cobh … She could make another futile attempt in that lifetime quest to find Michael Lacey.
She reaches for the directory. There are a dozen Laceys listed in Cork, four with an initial M.
She takes a deep breath, and begins to dial …
Five
I want to tell you, the shadows who listen in the dark, about the white reef. I want to tell you about the bungalow and the stone wall. Some things I know for certain. Some things I can only imagine, but I suspect they are all true.
The bungalow was painted putty-yellow. It had a red corrugated-iron roof. It had a green door and windows either side, polished to an anxious gleam, and net curtains crisscrossed demurely. There was a wrought-iron front gate in the hedge, and a twin row of blue pansies and yellow African marigolds at six-inch intervals on either side of the path to the door, plants that could be relied upon to make a show.
‘Making a show’ was important.
&
nbsp; Our mother had spent her childhood in pubs — and lest that conjure up some imagery of a cosy hostelry with polished colonial fittings and a roast of the day, let me mention the six o’clock swill in bare-boned country places where a couple of loners mumble at the bar, yellow-eyed as old dogs challenging all comers from their mangy kennel. Pubs that may have been originally designed to impress with their broad Australian verandas and their bevelled mirrors but now teetered on insecure foundations. The damp seeped in and the corridors smelled of rotting wood and tiny toadstools sprouted at the scotias and the toilet was cracked and brown-puddled and a sign sticky-taped to the cistern advised Out of Order. And in the bar, lit by a bare bulb, men — for they were mostly men, women drank at home, a few discreet sherries on the settee, gin in a tumbler at the kitchen table — drank with a fierce intensity, racing against the clock before the barman flicked the light and the doors closed. Unless you cared to come round the back and knock three times for the session that continued till the last patron was assisted to the door and set on a lurching course for his feral bed.
Our mother had lived in pubs all over Otago and Southland where, after an initial burst of euphoria following arrival, Grandad set to drinking his way through any profit, and Grandma, lips firmly clamped about a fag, set to keeping nine kids clothed and fed on what could be filched from the till. With a few drinks taken, Grandad was cheerful, a fake Irishman, calling in an accent that hovered somewhere between Galway and Tuatapere for his pretty little daughter to come and stand on the bar and give them all a verse or two of ‘Danny Boy’. He’d stand by, swaying, a sentimental tear in his bloodshot eye, as her voice soared. A few more drinks, though, and he’d be morose, then quarrelsome. He was incapable of success even in a pub up the Waitaki Valley right on the border of a district that had voted itself dry back in 1905 in a flurry of moral righteousness driven by women fighting the twin fronts of suffrage and sobriety. The stone pubs of the White Stone City had closed their doors. For fifty years, no spirituous liquor had been permitted to stain their polished bars. By rights, the Annandale hotel out in the country only a few yards across the district boundary should have made a killing. It should have been packed out every Saturday with the sports teams who drove out from their temperance town after the game. It should have been busy all week with a steady stream of customers, locals and those who called in for supplies before rattling back into town, Gladstone bags chinking with bottles, on the little blue Kains buses that stopped just outside the door.
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