Limestone

by Fiona Farrell

  It was all a lie.

  My white communion dress lay pinned in pieces on the table. I had new white shoes and a veil. I was word-perfect in the catechism (Q. Where is God? A. He is everywhere … all-seeing, all-knowing). For weeks Sister Ignatius had been drilling us. Day after day she had lined us up on the scuffed wooden floor in Room Two at St Mary’s and laid a penny on our protruding tongues in preparation for the moment when Father Molloy would deliver the real thing, the living body of Christ, in the presence of all our families and friends. She had told us the stories of those children who did not behave with due reverence, including the story of the little girl who had doubted and bitten the Host in two and how her mouth had filled with blood.

  I was practised, I was ready, I had passed my catechism with flying colours. Father Molloy had even patted me on the head and told me I’d done well to remember it all so accurately.

  And the horror of it all was that I didn’t believe a word. I lay in bed at night with the cold metallic taste of doubt on my tongue. I looked up at that great white wall of solid stone poised above our heads and knew that it could melt and come crashing down over us and sweep us all into chaos.

  I was eight years old and I was on my own in a random universe. I cried. I howled at the terror of it.

  Phemie gathered me into her arms, with a fierce embrace against her bony body. The buttons on her dress pressed painfully against my cheek. ‘Oh, you poor kiddie,’ she said, rocking me back and forth so that I cried even more. ‘Oh, you poor wee kiddie.’ Her big hand cradled my head, stroking my hair. I cried till I couldn’t cry any more. Then she set me directly in front of her and put her hand under my chin to force my face up so that I had to look directly into her eyes.

  ‘Clare!’ she said. ‘You must tell the truth. Now, that day when you went with Mr Moses in the truck, did something happen?’

  The truth. I must tell the truth.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Because of course something had happened. I had followed the little cat and got lost and Ozzie had found me.

  ‘Something bad?’ said Phemie. Her face was all splotchy as if she had been crying too.

  And I said yes, because I’d got lost, I’d been frightened, I’d cried.

  ‘What?’ said Phemie. ‘What happened?’

  But the wadding was too thick and I couldn’t get the words to budge through. She leaned in close, her face almost against mine. Her breath smelled of peppermints. She always carried a few peppermints in her pocket. ‘Clare?’ she said. ‘Did Mr Moses touch you?’

  I’d never noticed before, but one of her eyes had brown flecks in it and the other was pure blue. Phemie put both hands on my shoulders. She gave me a little shake.

  ‘Clare?’ she said. ‘Answer me.’

  I nodded. Because he had touched me, of course. He had lifted me up into the truck. He had put me onto the front seat for the ride home, eating Jaffas.

  ‘Did he touch you … down there?’ said Phemie. I knew what she meant. We didn’t say rude words like ‘bottom’ in our house. Or ‘lavatory’. Or ‘poo’. We said ‘down there’ — ‘Have you wiped yourself properly down there?’ We said, ‘Do you want to go?’ or ‘Have you been?’ or, more daringly precise, ‘Have you had a BM today?’ It was impolite to speak otherwise. Bottoms were not mentioned by people with aspirations to be ladylike.

  Phemie waited. The crying had turned into hiccups. Phemie repeated the question as if it mattered to be precise, her two different eyes looking straight into mine.

  ‘Clare, did Mr Moses touch you down there?’

  I had to think for a bit, because clearly I had to tell the truth and this was important, one of those adult inquiries that meant more to them than it did to me, like ‘Where have you left your shoes?’ or ‘Did you give that note to Sister Ignatius?’ Had Mr Moses touched my bottom as he lifted me into the truck? I had a vague memory of being perched on his bare arm, so, ‘Yes,’ I said.

  Phemie groaned as if she had been hit hard. Her arms fell to her sides. She leaned back on her heels and raised her face to the hall ceiling with her eyes tightly closed. I waited to see what would happen next. Through the wall I could hear the radio playing something cheerful, and Brian yelling and the clatter of plates. Our mother would be setting the table for tea.

  Phemie’s eyes flicked open. ‘Clare,’ she said, very serious. ‘You must never tell anyone about this, ever. Do you hear? Not Maddie, not your friends at school, not anyone.’

  ‘Not even Father Molloy?’ I said. I was about to make my first confession. I had been accumulating sins to mention, and it seemed as if this might qualify.

  Phemie gripped my arms and stared into my eyes with deep intent. ‘Not even Father Molloy. You have done nothing wrong here. You are an innocent in this. You have absolutely nothing to confess. But it would be best for everyone if you simply forgot all about it. And I can promise you this: you will never have to be polite to Mr Moses again. He will never come near you again. All right?’

  I nodded.

  She stood up and took my hand. ‘There’s a good girl,’ she said.

  She had never said such things to me before. She had never especially liked me, preferring Maddie as everyone did, on account of her pretty hair and because she was not clumsy like me, forever breaking things. But tonight Phemie took special care of me. Our mother went off to bed early with a migraine, but Phemie made banana custard for pudding — my favourite even though Maddie hated it and said it tasted of sick. And I was allowed first go at the bath so I had all the nice fresh water. I lay in bed that night feeling warm and contented and tasting banana, and fell asleep to the soft burr of voices from the sitting room.

  She was true to her word. Ozzie never came to visit again. He left not long after. A big removal truck came and emptied his house, and some other people moved in who had a Labrador with six puppies who rampaged round the garden and pressed their damp black noses against the front fence. Our mother’s face lost that daft bright look and reverted to its familiar tight-lipped anxious disapproval of everyone and everything. Every day she went off to work at the Copper Kettle, where the customers made their silly requests and left their shopping bags behind and were generally irritating while the boss was mean and a bully. And every day we went to school and came home to find Phemie ready with our Marmite piece and cup of tea, and Maddie and I squabbled over who had to feed the cat because we both hated the fishy reek of the cat food. I got a new bike at Christmas, a Raleigh with a bell and a carrier.

  Life went on, its tiny particles drifting down, layer by layer, setting to stone.

  Eight

  ‘Kil … something is it?’ says the woman labelled Sharon in the information centre. ‘You don’t recall anything more than that?’

  ‘No,’ says Clare. ‘But I think I’d recognise it if I heard it.’

  Kil … something. The place where it had blown so hard that a cow had opened its mouth and blown inside-out completely like an old umbrella. Not that she plans to say any of that to Sharon, whose long red nails tap smartly at the computer.

  ‘Well now, you realise there’s hundreds of those.’

  Another woman emerges from behind a screen covered in posters advertising the Land of One Hundred Thousand Welcomes, a misty collage of castles and white cottages and craggy old men cradling pints of Guinness. The information centre itself is a glistening hoard of leprechaun key rings and golf balls in green and gold presentation boxes and coffee mugs ornamented with shamrocks, all from the village in China next to the one that makes the stuffed golden eagles and the tee shirts with the Golden Gate outlined in sequins. The air jigs with fiddle and button accordion.

  Helen is small and blonde and richly bejewelled. Rings glitter on her slender fingers and golden chains hang about her perfect neck. She peers over Sharon’s shoulder.

  ‘This lady is looking for a place called Kil … something,’ says Sharon.

  ‘Then you’ll be looking for a while,’ says Helen. ‘“Kil” can mean a chur
ch or it can mean a wood. They’re different words in Irish, but when the maps were drawn they were anglicised the same. And there’s a few churches here, as you might have noticed.’

  ‘You’ve nothing more than that?’ says Sharon. ‘I mean, look at it: Kilbarrack, Kilbarron, Kilbarry … It’s endless.’

  A queue is beginning to build at Clare’s back. She can sense them waiting their turn while she makes her daft inquiry. She knows she sounds idiotic. Just another hopeless tourist hunting down a distant connection. One of those fools who have never set foot in Ireland yet go all misty at the thought of the Mountains of Mourne sweeping down to an unfamiliar sea, and feel a strong tribal affiliation with every Kelly or O’Toole on the entire planet. No different from those obsessives brandishing sheafs of birth and death notices culled painstakingly from some website funded by Mormons dedicated to identifying every possible candidate for eventual redemption. No different from those women determined to track down the hundreds of descendants of some fecund antecedent from County Antrim or Galway who fled starvation back in 1848 for the rookeries of Camberwell or Liverpool and set to some determined breeding.

  ‘Do you know anything about this place at all? Is it a village?’ says Sharon.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Clare.

  Idiot. Fool. She has so little to go on. A pencil sketch of a farmhouse and a girl leading a donkey. An unlikely story about a cow. Some dim memory that she was named for a beautiful place where they had once had to swap their babies for bread.

  ‘But I think it might be in Clare,’ she adds desperately.

  ‘Right,’ says Sharon as Helen beckons over the next in line. Someone who simply wants to book a medieval dinner at Bunratty. Now, that makes sense.

  ‘Clare … that might narrow it down a bit,’ says Sharon. Tippety tap tippety tap.

  ‘Maybe a farming district?’ says Clare. There was the donkey after all, the hint of stone wall and fields, the barefoot girl in her raggy skirt.

  ‘A townland then,’ says Sharon ‘A townland in Clare beginning with Kil …’

  More people have joined the queue. Clare can sense a certain restlessness.

  ‘Kilbaha,’ says Sharon. ‘Kilbane. Kilcloher, Kilfenora … Any of those sound familiar?’

  A man neatly labelled Liam emerges from behind the misty castles and the Guinness glasses.

  ‘Liam,’ says Sharon. ‘This lady is looking for a place beginning with Kil.’ Tippety tap tippety tap.

  ‘Killybegs?’ says Liam. ‘Up in Donegal? I went to tourism college there. Now, that’s a beautiful part of the country, with the famous Slieve League nearby, the highest cliffs in Europe — and Glencolumcille. That’s a lovely place. We’ve got some brochures here …’

  ‘She thinks it might be in Clare,’ says Sharon.

  ‘Oh,’ says Liam. ‘Well, good luck then …’ and he beckons over the next in line: a hotel to be booked in Killarney.

  ‘Do you mind me asking,’ says Sharon as churches and woods scroll by, ‘why you’re looking for this Kil place?’

  ‘My father came from there,’ says Clare.

  ‘Is that so?’ says Sharon.

  ‘At least, I think he did,’ says Clare. My god! How could she be so uncertain about the origins of her own father? How could they have asked so few questions of him? How could he have told them so little?

  ‘Killkishen,’ says Sharon, though there is no point to this, no point at all. ‘Killaloe … Killinaboy …’

  ‘That’s it!’ says Clare, the word flying back to her and landing with a thump. ‘Of course! That’s it. Killinaboy!’ The place where the cow blew inside-out! Killinaboy!

  ‘You’re sure now?’ says Sharon.

  ‘Yes!’ says Clare. ‘Yes! That’s the name! Killinaboy!’ She could have hugged Sharon.

  ‘Killinaboy,’ says Liam. ‘I know it. It’s in the Burren. Now, that’s a beautiful part of the country. The Cliffs of Moher: they’re nearby, and well worth a visit. And Poulnabrone. That’s famous. It was on the stamps. We’ve some brochures here …’

  And within five minutes here is Clare emerging from the information centre clutching a fistful of fliers for a weaving centre, a perfumerie creating its products exclusively from wild flowers, a selection of craft shops and horse treks, B&Bs, pubs with and without traditional music, spas and shebeens selling wines flavoured with seaweed, fuchsia and honey, adventure centres offering kayaking and bird-watching opportunities, a cave with illuminated stalagmites and six tours daily, a place that produces smoked salmon, a variety of maps and a printout of the twenty-one place names beginning with Kil in County Clare, for back-up, just in case. Back at the desk Sharon turns with relief to a couple from Milwaukee keen to buy two tee shirts and a set of whisky glasses.

  Ireland lies in Clare’s hands. She has a blue Toyota Starlet that holds her neatly, along with her airline suitcase. She has three days before her return flight. Three days when she ought to be contemplating West German art critique and Tracey Emin’s unborn babies, not to mention delivering her own consideration of spiritual iconography and the wall as its place of expression, a paper that has taken her months to research and write.

  Yet here she is, driving north with the afternoon traffic out of the city, bunking class. She feels reckless, one of the naughty kids at last, heading off to lounge behind the pavilion on the playing fields with her tights rolled down round her ankles to sun her legs instead of doing Latin.

  She drives out of town, past water meadows where people walk briskly behind the wiggle waggle of dogs following up a whole directory of smells. Past terraces of grey houses that dwindle away to a countryside fluffing up with green leaf. Even the rubbish blown into the flowery hedges takes on a jaunty poetical air and daffodils toot spring in every window box and in clumps amidst damp spring grass. She drives with the road map spread on the passenger seat where it flaps a little in the breeze, for it is warm enough, this afternoon, for an open window. There are tables already outside a pub by a bridge, and fishermen seated on folding stools along the river’s edge with baskets and umbrellas and Thermos flasks and buckets and all the clutter required to hook a fish here.

  It all feels foreign yet oddly familiar, as Europe always does, because she has spent a lifetime of books and pictures and movies where men went fishing with hooks in their tweed hats, instead of bare-headed, with a sugar sack slung over the handlebars of the bike, down to the wharf where the waves hurled themselves in from South America and you were allowed to come too, so long as you stayed on the little curve of sand behind the breakwater. There the sand glinted with smashed shell and you were safe, though you could hear the sea growling as it tried to get through the barrier of stone. And there were penguins nesting in the cliffs and the air smelled like sardines. And you could play all afternoon, making moats and catching jellyfish until twilight and the ride home, perched on the bar of your dad’s bike, the damp sack with its cod or trevally knocking at your knees as his legs pumped you both up the hill. There would be the smell of sweat and tobacco and fish, and then you’d be swinging round the corner and free-wheeling for home, the sun setting in long red streaks over the Kakanuis, the dash of chilly evening air making your eyes water as you hung on tight to the handlebars, between your father’s arms …

  The road twists in two narrow lanes that require concentration, past houses unlike the houses of home: old houses of grey stone with two storeys and a door in the middle, or post-war stucco tinted lollipop pink or yellow or mint green, or new-built in stone cladding with massive gateways sporting a heraldic lion on each post, or a pair of dragons or hunting dogs, or eagles with spread wings. The land is soft and low and browsed by big black and white cows, and the air through the open window bears a cheesy whiff blended with diesel and damp earth.

  North she drives, past signposts pointing to places that sound like songs: Curraghnalagt. Ballynahara. Lissnavourna. They may have been anglicised back when the maps were compiled, but they retain the rhythm and assonance of a speec
h that is not in the least bit English. She switches on the radio, finding it ready-tuned to a commercial frequency with two fast-talking hosts and news on the hour and a welter of advertisements for carpet cleaners and weekend luxury hotel breaks — the kind of racket that would normally have her searching frantically for some calm ad-free debate on the status of the health service or a round-up of the week in Parliament, or maybe some of those multi-tasking instrumentalists from St Martin in the Fields performing another little number in three classical parts: medium, slow and very very fast. But here she is listening happily to breathless promotions for pizza places and furniture shops, and even enjoying the repartee between a coked-up young man and a woman with a throaty catch to a voice that sounds as if it has spent a great deal of time wreathed in smoke, ordering rounds in noisy bars.

  North she drives, through market towns where the traffic squeezes to a crawl so she is able to look in the shop windows and read the signs: O’Brian and Sons, Butchers. A Spar supermarket advertising a special this week on fresh asparagus. Chemists and hairdressers and clothes shops where she has time to make a brief appraisal of the new season’s fashions, all determinedly frilly and flimsy and tropic bright. There’s a pub combining a lounge bar and an undertakers, just like in the movies and the Irish novels. There’s a square with a statue of a man in a long pigeon-spattered coat who is presumably some hero in the struggle for Irish independence, the kind of man whose name would feature in a rousing ballad, taking up the plinth that at home would feature a disconsolate soldier in First World War puttees. There’s an enormous grey church surrounded by a wagon train of funerary cars. Then the road opens out again and the big Euro-lorries thunder down only inches away.