Limestone

by Fiona Farrell

  ‘Any damage and you’re liable, Mick!’ said Mr Powell.

  ‘She’ll be right,’ said Ozzie, cooling things down as neighbours up and down the street woke to the twilight of the gods at Number 45.

  ‘Bloody lunatic,’ said Mr Powell. ‘It’s not on. It’s just not on at all. I thought that bloody horse in the back yard was bad enough, but this … !’

  ‘Calm down, Clive,’ said his little round wife. And ‘Oh bugger off,’ said our mother. (We had never heard her swear before. It entered our secret games. ‘Oh, bugger off!’ Maddie and I said to one another, listening to the effect, the grand dismissal of it, the sheer power of a bad word. ‘Oh, bugger off!’) She seemed taller as she said it, proud in her dressing gown in the reflected glow of the fire and the Tilley lamp, like an old queen in a picture, watching her daft husband making a fiery field of her front garden.

  When we woke next morning it was to charred wood and trampled earth. Our house stood naked in its midst as if it had just survived intense bombardment. Across the front of the section where the hedge had been, our father was grubbing roots to clear the way for a shallow trench, and that afternoon, a Saturday, he borrowed Ozzie’s truck and we drove out to Weston: Ozzie and Dad and me. Maddie could have come too, but she preferred to stay, blissfully scraping mud from Tonto’s patchwork coat and combing his long white tail. I sat in the middle as we roared away up Holmes’ Hill between hawthorn hedges heavy with red berries and paddocks of grazing black and white cows. Dad was happy now, no longer the fierce silent savage who had stood at the fire in the darkness. Ozzie began to sing My My My Delilah and Dad joined in, and I did too, as we rocked through the countryside high above the little scurrying cars.

  After a bit, we turned off onto a narrow white road and up over a rise into a place where the hill had been sliced open. The earth had been cut like a cake, with chunks removed in even, rectangular pieces. There was machinery parked at the foot of the cut and trucks and a square office all covered like Ozzie’s truck in white floury dust. Behind the office was a hillock of broken stone. The truck roared to a standstill and we climbed out.

  ‘There you go, Mick,’ said Ozzie. ‘Help yourself.’

  That was how the wall began. A pile of broken stone in the wreckage of our garden. A thousand stones for twenty feet, Dad said. A thousand bits of broken stone. An old mallet from his shed, a shallow trench, a few scraps of timber knocked to form a frame from which Dad hung a rusty bolt to point straight down to the middle of the earth and keep things decent. He tied a long string to the frame and handed me one end.

  ‘You hang onto this, and stand here, and we’ll make certain we’re starting true. We don’t want any old pigs setting our wall crooked, do we now.’

  He walked away up the line of the trench to the far corner by the Powells’ fence and knelt down. I could feel the tug of him like a big fish when you held it at the end of a line at the breakwater, that moment before you squeal and pull it up, your dad helping you hand over hand, the flicker of it emerging into the sunlight. I held my end of the string carefully while Dad knelt in the dirt and peered along at me with one eye closed.

  ‘Grand,’ he said. ‘Now, there’s just one more thing to do.’ He gave me a shilling. ‘You put this here.’ And he showed me where to place it in the middle of the trench. ‘That’s what the old fellas did to make a wall strong,’ he said, and he covered it with the first stone. A big flat broken piece that he chose with care from the heap, stroking it as if it were skin, and looking pleased with it the way he did sometimes when he saw our mother all dressed up to go to town or to church in her blue dress with the white belt. ‘Nice,’ he’d say, stroking the curve of her bottom, and she’d say, ‘Don’t be daft, Mick. Not now, not in front of …’ Nodding her head in our direction and stepping aside. That was the way our father stroked the slab of white stone. As if it were poplin stretched smooth over the curve of skin and bone.

  He placed the slab over my shilling, nudging it till it lay to his satisfaction. He chose another piece and laid it alongside, adjusting it till its edges fitted flat. And another. The foundation began to take shape.

  I wanted to help.

  ‘Not this time, Clare,’ he said. ‘Building walls isn’t for little girls. Here.’ He handed me a little chip of limestone. It fitted snugly into my hand. ‘Why don’t you make a picture.’

  I looked around. ‘Where?’ I said. There was no paper. Just this broken bit of stone.

  ‘Right under your feet,’ said Dad. And he took my stone and bent down and made a mark — a clear white line — on the black tarmac. ‘You do a drawing for me here, and then if I do need a bit of help I can call you over.’

  He turned away, serious now, and set to work. The stones were big and irregular but he lifted them into place as if he had practised for a very long time.

  I made a mark on the footpath. It looked a bit like a horse, so I added a mane and a tail, and then I drew a girl riding it with long straight hair streaming in the wind. The footpath stretched away on both sides. Miles and miles of it. This wasn’t like drawing on paper. There were no edges here to hold the drawing in. This drawing could go on and on for ever, up the street, round the corner, all the way into town and off up the North Road. I drew a road for the horse to gallop down and a house with two storeys that could belong to the girl. A house like the ones in books. A proper house, rather than an ordinary old one-storey bungalow. A dolls’ house with a door in the middle and windows upstairs and a chimney from which smoke curled. I drew some trees with birds nesting in them, and another girl wearing an elaborate dress and high pointed heels. The piece of white stone was worn down to a stub but it did not matter, because there was heaps more. There could be no end to the stone, no end to the drawing.

  Nor was it forbidden to draw on the footpath, unlike drawing on the walls of a house. I had done that once when I was sick with the mumps: drawn a princess in a crown among the trellis of blue roses that lined our bedroom wall. ‘What on earth are you up to?’ our mother said, in the same voice she used when I broke things, which was often, for I was a clumsy child, given to tripping over carpets and dropping precious plates, not quite in control of my bony arms and legs. ‘You naughty girl!’ she said when she saw my picture. And how could I explain that I wanted only to make a picture like the ones that hung on other walls in the house? The young man in a blue velvet suit who hung midway between the hall mirror and the barometer that always pointed to Fair. The Virgin who sat above the chest of drawers in our room with her big white baby on her lap, both of them liable to catch their deaths of cold, especially the baby who was clad only in a wisp of white silk among all those dark damp rocks. Or the stone cottage with the girl in her raggy skirt leading her donkey that hung above the dining-room table.

  But out here on the footpath different rules applied. I could draw for as long and as far as I wanted.

  Later, when I was older, we used scraps of the white stone to draw hopscotches on the footpath: a careful cross with numbers in each square and a smooth pebble for tossing. Hop hop, we went. Wobbling down to scoop up the stone, the relief of both feet landing squarely on four and five, the triumphant return, hop hop hop, no standing on lines or you’d be out … But that first time, while my father built his wall, I drew a world without end. I sat crosslegged in the sun while my father stripped off his shirt and lifted stones from the heap, sorting them carefully. He laid a firm base of the biggest slabs, then set a second row on top of that, standing these stones on end rather than flat, so that they leaned against one another companionably, at unexpected angles.

  Ozzie Moses came by.

  ‘That’s a nice job you’re doing, Mick,’ he said. He didn’t offer to lend a hand this time. He could see Dad knew what he was doing, so he simply stood and watched.

  Mr Powell was trimming the lawn edges with his special long-handled shears, but curiosity finally got the better of him and he came to watch too.

  ‘No mortar?’ he said.

>   ‘No,’ said Dad patiently but with the slightest hint that Mr Powell might just be a bit of a fool who didn’t know what he was talking about. Mortar holds water. It would cause the stones to shift eventually. This was proper dry stone walling: the stones were held steady by their weight alone. ‘Trust me,’ he said, ‘I’ve done a few of these in my time. It’ll last a hundred years.’

  Mr Powell grunted in disbelief and went back to his trimming.

  Dad took no notice. He lifted another stone from the pile, turned it this way and that, examining it closely, set it in its place. ‘Two on one, or one on two, but never two on three,’ he said. ‘That’s the secret to the strength of it.’

  Ozzie said, ‘Izzat right?’

  And I drew a castle on the footpath, with a pennant flying from the highest turret.

  All that day and night and the next and the next, the wall grew. Only one stone wide, yet it stayed upright. Neighbours passed by, and to begin with they just said, ‘Keeping busy there, Mick?’, or they paused to look at my drawing and said, ‘My word, that’s a big picture you’re making, Clare. You must take after your dad, with the artistic talent. You’re a chip off the old block.’ And Dad looked up from nudging a stone into place on his wall and winked at me.

  After a day or so, a little group of men took to gathering on the footpath outside our house in the long evenings after tea, smoking cigarettes and watching the wall grow. Under their watchful scrutiny, our father became a bigger man. He seemed stronger, suddenly, a man of some substance. No longer the skinny clown but someone serious, deliberate in his actions, in charge of his material. Worthy of respect. He worked with a new lightness and energy, quick and precise, and the other men watched closely as he chose each stone, set it end on, eyes squinting to be sure it was exactly poised. Row on row. They asked him questions. Could you use any kind of a stone? And he said limestone was the best and what he was used to working with, back home. And you should always use what belonged to the place. Limestone in limestone country, granite in granite country. It was a good stone. You needed some friction if it was to stand. Smooth rounded river stones, for instance, were the devil, near impossible. But limestone was perfect.

  ‘Won’t the stone rot?’ said the men. ‘Stood end on like that, instead of flat as it was laid down in the earth?’ That was what the experts said, didn’t they, that you must always lie it the same way as it had formed or it would flake and turn to powder? And Dad said no, he laid them at angles so the water would run off and there were no vertical gaps between them where it might puddle. And yes, he had learned how to do this when he was a lad, learned the knack of it from the old fellas who came around each year to mend walls on the farms. They had their own ways and manner of speech that no one not introduced to the profession could understand with its mix of Irish and English, its own peculiar sayings and terms. And yes, walls as thick as this one were enough to keep cows in, and sheep, better than a double-stone wall for all their tie stones and rubble fill, for the animals were nervous of something that looked so frail, with the light shining clear through in the gaps between the stones and would not set foot on it or use it to climb over to gain the field on the other side. He could build double stone too — dry stone like this one, but with two skins around a heart of smaller stones, but the single stone was the wall he knew best, and for beauty and strength it could not be bettered.

  The men stood in the summer twilight watching the painstaking labour, the way men do. Mick Lacey was making a nice job of it. A neat job, out of place on this street where the houses stood moored either side of the road like wooden boats creaking in the slightest wind, bending when the earth beneath their foundations rippled and shook in some earthquake swarm, for wasn’t this whole country a waka or a fish? Unsteady? So you woke in the dark to the flexing of ceiling joists, the rattle of dwang and soffit, the whole flimsy construction that was your home making its adjustment to the earth’s heaving.

  Mick stacked stones as they did in a steadier country, following instinct and instruction. He sweated and frowned, while answering the men’s questions courteously, and after a bit they stopped asking, just stood and watched as the wall grew. Mum brought him his tea and he had it outside, not wanting to waste a minute.

  By week’s end, my picture reached all the way from our front path to the Powells’ letterbox, an improved version of the world I knew every day. It included castles and forests and birds like a row of ticks flying between fat clouds, the whole linked by twisting roads just wide enough to walk along if you placed one foot tiptoe behind the other. Dad patted me on the head and said, ‘Not bad, Clare. Not bad at all.’ His wall had grown, too, to front the whole width of our garden, with two big stones in the centre leaving a gap where he rehung the gate.

  Back home, he said, they wouldn’t always bother with a gate for a wall in a field. They’d just fill the gap with stones and lift them out when they wanted to move the cattle, then put them back after.

  Maddie and I went to bed to the glow of the Tilley lamp around the edges of the blind, and if I woke in the night to check, he’d be there, in the rosy glow of the pink panel, placing stones.

  By the time Brian came home from the hospital, it was finished. A wall of beautiful white stones, a delicate tracery of rock over a metre high, through which you could see glimpses of the road beyond. That way, Dad said, the wind could blow through and it would not fall. That was how they made them back in Killinaboy where the wind blew so hard that a cow had opened its mouth once during a gale and blown inside out like an umbrella. They’d had the devil of a job turning it back the right way, with its skin facing outwards.

  He patted the jagged row of stones that capped it all. A thousand stones bedded end on, each hardening where it stood beneath the weight of the stones around and above it. No concrete or mortar to conduct water that would seep and freeze. He had made it properly as he had been taught by the old fellas, long ago and far away.

  ‘This’ll be standing, Clare,’ he said, ‘for years and years till you’re an old woman, even older than me.’

  He went in to wash his hands at the kitchen sink. Mum was feeding Brian jelly and ice cream at the table as if he were a baby, though he was perfectly able to do it himself.

  ‘I’m done,’ said Dad. ‘That young fella won’t be gettin’ away on you again.’

  She did not look up.

  ‘Good,’ she said.

  Dad stood wiping his hands on the tea towel the way she hated. Maddie was spreading Marmite on a slice of white bread. I was drinking a glass of milk. The electric clock above the stove tick tick ticked, the seconds clicking down like broken shell drifting down in a soupy ocean, like tiny scraps of white bone floating down to form a dense layer of time. The cat purred. Brian opened his mouth passively for his spoonful of raspberry jelly. The radio sang that she loved you yeah yeah yeah she loved you yeah yeah yeah …

  Something had died.

  He went the next morning. Walked away through the gate in that gap in the white stone wall to buy a packet of cigarettes at the shop. And disappeared.

  Six

  The rituals do not alter. San Francisco, Munich, Toronto and now Cork.

  Three hundred and forty-eight art historians gather to scratch their mark on the wall by attending the 33rd Annual Conference of their professional association.

  Clare stands in the foyer holding a cup of the usual appalling coffee, her name tag pinned to her jacket lapel: Dr Clare Lacey, University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Tags always made her feel like kindergarten, with her name and address pinned to her jersey in case she became lost on the way home, a clean and ironed hanky safety-pinned into her coat pocket, and her gloves tied on a string around her neck so that they dangled pathetically from the sleeves.

  She surveys the programme pinned to the cork board by the registration desk, checking for late additions and scratchings like any punter ringing a dead cert for the 2.30. Her bag sags on her shoulder, bulky with orientation: four receptions, civic
and lesser. Guided tours of the city. The AGM of the professional association. A Round Table to which the public are cordially invited. Film screenings. A book fair. Lunches. Exhibitions (James Barry, all noble neo-classical profiles and suppressed revolution at the Crawford; edgy mixed-media installations off Grattan Street). A bus trip to Killarney. And two days divided into twenty-two sessions that are further divided into one hundred and fifty-three half-hour lectures ticking off at 9.30 a.m., with breaks for coffee and an hour and a half for lunch, then on to the dead hour, five o’clock, when everyone sits in their conference chairs numbed by the deluge of fact and opinion, and the unfortunate speaker is just the support act, the tyro band warming the audience for the idol who is at this moment closeted, no doubt, in his dressing room in a red satin dressing gown, screwing some eager groupie in preparation for his climactic appearance.

  The speaker in the dead hour is the minor asteroid lost in the lustre of the major star who has been ringed in for the plenary session at six. After which there will be just time to slug down some wine and nibble some nibbles before the usual conference dinner at the usual hotel, with the round white-clothed tables, the artfully arranged chicken breast, the tangerine mousse, and the accompanying rookery racket of academia preening, grooming and working the room.

  She has scored the dead hour. There she is: 5.15–5.45 on Saturday evening. Clare Lacey. Cave/Cathedral/Carpark: the wall as visionary locus. She is billed alongside half an hour on the reappearances of unborn children in the work of Tracey Emin, and a session on West German art critique in the fifties. She can feel the yawning start already.

  Location/Dis-location. One hundred and fifty-three sessions, ten at a time, so a choice must of necessity be made. Session One. Will it be A study of Francis Bacon’s paintings of interiors with figures, evoking the uncanny space of the now lost ‘Big House’, a recurrent trope that emerges also in Gothic form within Irish literature … ? Hmmmm … Or a critical discussion concerning the role of the art museum in the construction of narratives of art and art history (The Musée du Quai Branly proposes a departure from the conventional anthropological and ethnographic narrative of its precursors, for a structure in which architecture, design and curatorship are coordinated to offer the exhibits as aesthetic fragments of a gigantic, mysterious poem)? How very French, she thinks, pencilling a question mark.