She drives slowly, peering through the flick flack of the wipers at this intricate land, slowing hopefully for every likely farm gate. Down to a coast of tiny coves and hotels with vast vacant parks for the summer tour buses and a little town with gift shops filled with lumpy knitted sweaters. There is a sign pointing south to Poulnabrone, so she goes there. Why not? It is preferable to meandering and it has, after all, featured on the stamps.
It is indeed beautiful: three massive limestone slabs set like a milking stool on a paving of white stone, exquisitely balanced so that the grey canvas of the sky is slung between its bare ribs. The stone on which it stands rings under her shoes, as if it were no more than a thin skin stretched taut over an echoing void, and between each slab, cracks open, some narrow, some wide, where small persistent plants flourish. Through the cracks, beneath her feet, lies another landscape, a black and white negative of this surface country with its own hills and streams. She stands on the stone skin beneath the golfing umbrella and takes a photo for some Japanese tourists, honeymooners probably, who arrange themselves before the cairn in a Hollywood clinch, arms about one another, lips pouted for a Grand Prix/Miss World kind of kiss. Once she has pressed the shutter they insist, in mime show, on taking her photo too. So there she is, standing before the remains of a Neolithic tomb, its covering stripped away, its body lost, the whole sorry business of death pecked to the bare bones. She smiles under the striped umbrella for a viewer she doesn’t know, feeling like one of those remote tribespeople who fear quite rightly that the camera is stealing their soul.
She drives on down the road to a junction where a castle stands with all its windows blown to eyeless sockets. She turns right. Another village, a building called the Burren Experience, a tearoom with scones and coffee, more fields, a spa town with a white hotel and range of mineral treatments and that faintly sour breath that hangs over all spa towns no matter how grand the glass-domed baths, no matter how health-enhancing the waters: that whiff of flaking skin and mortal, unreliable bodies. More fields, villages, hillside farms and at the end of a long meandering day she is back to Tir na nÓg and VACANCY.
Hopeless.
The past is gone. It is pointless to try to track it down. The road has wound round and round the country like the dragon in some illuminated text, over and under and in and out till it ends by eating its own tail.
She sits in the guests’ sitting room with a pot of strong tea and a slice of Mrs Bunn’s sultana cake, reading a magazine and warming herself at a peat fire that smells as sweet and smoky as Lapsang Souchong. The Talbots return about six. She hears them in the lobby, stamping off wet boots. She turns a page: Paris Hilton’s celebrity bedroom with a chihuahua guarding a tufted pink silk coverlet, her celebrity kitchen, her celebrity dining room. There are Posh and Becks hand in hand on Becks’ Big Birthday Spend-up in Paris. She sits there wondering why Posh and Becks always hold hands? Surely no one holds hands after the first few weeks? All that marching in lock step around the shops, sweaty palm to palm, choosing watches and underwear … The door opens.
The Talbots’ eyes are invisible behind steamy spectacles. They have had a most unsatisfactory day.
Mr Talbot had forgotten the field lens.
‘Honestly,’ says Mrs Talbot, pouring a cup of tea, then moodily settling to picking all the sultanas from her slice of cake and arranging them on her saucer. ‘What could be more infuriating?’
A small avalanche of damp packets hits the coffee table: the specimens they have managed to find must be examined before they become mouldy and of no use whatsoever. The room fills with the scent of damp earth and Mr Talbot’s socks which emanate a rich porcine pong redolent of aged Stilton. The ink on the packets has smeared in the rain and become almost impossible to read, though Mr Talbot pushes his glasses onto the top of his domed head and peers closely while Mrs Talbot produces a microscope. Then they settle happily to squabbling over identification.
‘Lophocolea, I’d say …’ muses Mr Talbot. ‘Doesn’t seem to have three apical teeth …’
‘I’m not so sure,’ says Mrs Talbot, twiddling and peering. ‘I’d say Chiloscyphus … What a pity we don’t have the perianth. Are you sure there isn’t another packet? Did you drop anything when you were getting out of the car?’
‘No, I did not,’ says Mr Talbot through a mouthful of cake. ‘And be careful. You’re winding that down too close. You’ll ruin the lens.’
‘Well, at least I remembered to bring it,’ said Mrs Talbot. ‘Papillose spores …’
‘Let me have a look,’ says Mr Talbot, wanting a go with the toy.
‘In a minute,’ says Mrs Talbot. ‘Don’t be so bossy … yes, yes … definitely papillae …’
‘Lophocolea!’ says Mr Talbot, triumph releasing a sprinkling of crumbs that land like small insects in his beard. ‘I told you so! Globose or triquetrous?’
‘Globose, I think,’ says Mrs Talbot, twiddling.
‘CAREFUL!’ says Mr Talbot. ‘You’re much too close! Now let me take a look for myself …’
A drink, thinks Clare. A drink in a bar safely distant from the slightest whiff of liverwort.
Mrs Bunn knows just the place: Bophy Flynn’s, she says. Just down the road. And how fortunate it’s a Saturday, for on Saturdays there is music.
Bophy Flynn’s is crowded. A crush of people, locals mostly from the sound of them. Men with the look of outdoor work. Older women dressed up for the evening, lipstick and earrings and a vodka mix at the tables. Young women in skinny jeans and plunging necklines amid the young men with their close-cropped hair clustered round the bar. All catching up on the news of the week at the tops of their voices while Clare eats fish pie and boiled potatoes and drinks a glass of German Riesling. She is considering the toffee pudding when there is some sound beyond the crush of bodies by the fireplace in the front bar, the sound of a fiddle tuning, seesawing from A to E to D to G.
‘Mind if we join you?’ say a couple of women looking for seats in the crowded room, and from there it is where are you from? And Siobhan says she has a cousin in New Zealand, where was it exactly? Way, something … In North Island. Way … ?
‘Wai?’ says Clare. ‘There’s lots of places beginning with Wai. It means water. There’s a lot of water.’
And is she here for the session? Because she has picked a good night. Noel Whelan is going to play and she has to hear him: he is one of the best around.
‘Way-tack … something,’ says Siobhan.
‘Waitakere?’ says Clare and Siobhan says yes, that sounds like it, something like that anyway, it’s near a beach, she’d sent a photo, and it looked beautiful, like Ibiza only with no big hotels, just this long white strand and her cousin liked it there. She is married to a Kiwi and has a kid and … There’s Steve! Steve! Come over here. He’s been to New Zealand, last year. Come over here now and meet … Clare is it? … And can I get you another, what’re you having? Anyone else while I’m at it? And Steve brings some other people with him and she is introduced to them all as Clare from New Zealand, and one has an aunt who was a nun in New Zealand, and the conversation takes a familiar homely turn into that search for common acquaintance, and the nun turns out to be that same Sister Gonzaga who taught Clare singing when she was at school, and her niece is saying Sister Gonzaga had been set on an opera career, she had the most beautiful voice, but she’d entered the convent and there was some hint of disappointment in love, though no one would say that exactly, but it would have been a man for certain. She’d seen the photos and her aunt had been a beauty in her youth. A beauty and a great singer. Her niece can’t sing a note, tone deaf, the nuns used to beat her for singing out of tune, they thought she did it deliberately, they couldn’t believe anyone could be that bad. But she likes the music, likes listening, and could she get Clare another? What was she drinking? And anyone else while she’s at it? And all the while the music is gathering under the conversation and Clare is feeling better than she has all day. She might not have found Michael La
cey, but perhaps she has found the kind of place he had known.
A hush falls on the room. A big pink-faced man is standing by the fire, tucking a fiddle onto his shoulder. The crowd grows silent and attentive suddenly and the other musicians seated round him sit a little straighter. And then they are away. They are fast. They are unbelievably dextrous. No relation to those bored individuals making a buck belting out ‘Dirty Old Town’ and the ‘Black Velvet Band’ in the fake-Irish pubs thousands of miles away. Jigs and reels driven by fierce concentration, the tune tossed about, ornamented till the simple lines of the original burst into leaf and tendril and Whelan’s bald head is gleaming with sweat and all together now they race for the final chord and hit it with a flourish and the crowd applauds.
They cheer and clap and Whelan says it’s good to be back here, home after so many years away in America and especially tonight for there’s a man here whom he hasn’t heard in years, a man who was a legend back when he was a lad growing up in Killinaboy: a man who set many like himself off along the road following music and who has agreed to sing for us tonight let’s hear it for … Jimmy Roche!
The crowd parts to make way for an old man who has been seated in a corner by the bar all evening, nursing a glass. Clare had noticed him when she went to buy her round for the crowd at the table. An old man, with thinning hair neatly combed in individual strands over the crown, quiet amid the hubbub. Now he makes his way, bent almost double and leaning for support on the arm of a plump woman with elaborately permed hair. With infinite dignity they move to the space in front of the fire, where he is found a seat and turns to face the audience. The crowd is quiet now. No one is pulling pints at the bar, no one is chatting down the back of the room.
The old man seems shy, bent like a dry branch so that his face is lowered. He sits with one hand on each knee and the woman seats herself next to him. She reaches over to cover one of his hands with her own. Then Jimmy begins to sing.
It doesn’t sound like anything Clare has ever heard before, at least not from Ireland. The song swoops and twists like raga. It has that catch in the throat of fado. His voice is old yet clear, and though she doesn’t have a clue what the words might mean they sound like loss. Like the loss of someone deeply loved, the loss of love on a dark night on a bare shore with wind keening in the chimney or the loss of someone who went out to buy a packet of cigarettes one fine morning, and never returned. Someone to whom it has not been possible to say goodbye properly, and who you will miss for the rest of your life.
There may be a ballad there somewhere, offering the bare branches of a regular structure, but Jimmy’s voice lands on it like a wilful bird, then swoops away, circles and returns, lifts and falls, and it is sad like a dark bird and beautiful like its flight.
When it ends on a simple phrase that could as easily be a beginning, the room is silent. It would be absurd to clap, as absurd as to clap the bird or the bare branches of the tree. They don’t depend on something so little as applause to exist. They simply are. The voice of the old man fades into the quiet. A few silent beats, then the crowd finds its voice too, and they call to him. They ask for more, but the old man shakes his head and smiles, pleased at having given satisfaction, and returns to his place at the bar.
‘And that’, says Noel Whelan, ‘is Jimmy Roche. And that is how it is done!’
The music after is as expertly executed, as dazzling, but it feels somehow frail after Jimmy’s song. All dash and glitter after classical perfection.
And sometime late in the evening, when there is a pause in the music, Clare pushes her way through the crowd. The man sits with cracked hands cradling a near-empty glass, his back crooked.
‘Excuse me, Mr Roche,’ she says. ‘I just wanted to thank you for your singing and may I buy you a pint?’
‘That’d be grand,’ says the man.
She catches the barman’s eye and flicks her finger for ‘again’, then she takes a deep breath. ‘Mr Roche, I wonder if I might ask you a question.’
The man waits.
‘I’m looking for someone who came from round here,’ she says. ‘At least, I think he did. Michael Lacey. Mick Lacey. I haven’t seen him in years but he’d be getting on. Maybe eighty-nine? Ninety? Would you know him by any chance?’
The old man looks up at her from under his eyebrows. ‘Mick Lacey, you say?’ he says.
‘That’s right,’ says Clare. ‘A skinny man, with red hair.’
Jimmy considers her side-on with a bright alert eye.
‘And why would you be looking for him, now?’ he says. ‘You’re not from Dublin, are you? You’re not the taxes or the Gardai?’
‘No,’ says Clare, laughing. ‘I’m not from Dublin. I knew him when I was a child, in New Zealand.’
‘New Zealand is it?’ says Jimmy. ‘You’ve come a long way to find Mick so you have.’
‘Yes,’ says Clare. ‘A very long way.’
There is a long pause. Jimmy stares intently into his glass. The noise around them in the bar is deafening but it seems as if there is no sound at all but this old man’s soft voice. ‘Mick Lacey … Ah so …’
‘You knew him?’ says Clare.
‘I did that,’ says Jimmy. ‘A skinny fella, nothin’ to him.’
‘So he lived here?’ says Clare.
Jimmy is not a man to be nudged or hurried. He speaks when he is ready. Cracks open between speeches like the splits between limestone flags. Clare leaves them to widen.
‘Ah not at all,’ he says. ‘He lived on the road. He’d work on a farm and when he had the money in his pocket he was off again. He was not a man for sitting by his own fireside.’
‘No,’ says Clare. ‘He was not.’
‘The Hiker,’ says Jimmy. ‘That’s what they called him round here. The Hiker.’
‘Is that right?’ says Clare. ‘When I knew him in New Zealand he was an artist.’
‘An artist now?’ says Jimmy. ‘Well now, I never knew that.’
Another pause.
‘An artist now …’
His drink arrives, chocolate-black with a creamy head in a glistening glass.
‘Your health,’ says Jimmy, raising the drink to his lips, his old hand shaking so hard it’s a miracle the glass doesn’t fall and shatter.
Clare waits in the silent centre of Bophy Flynn’s on a Saturday night as it draws toward closing time.
‘He was an artist with the stone, mind. The long wall at Boyles, over by Monanaleen. Now, that was Mick Lacey.’
Monanaleen. Clare stows the word away.
Jimmy looks at her shrewdly. ‘And how did you meet Mick then, out there in New Zealand?’
‘He worked for us,’ she says. ‘He built a wall.’
Jimmy nods. ‘Ah he’d be your man for that, so he would.’
Clare has her hands clenched in her pockets, trying for calm: just another foreigner making a casual inquiry about a former acquaintance.
‘Do you know where he might be now?’ she says. ‘Is he still alive? I’d love to catch up with him.’
The woman who had accompanied the old man when he rose to sing is leaning in close, listening, keeping an eye on him: her father, presumably, for she shares his blue eyes and high colouring.
Jimmy takes a sip and leans back as if he were chewing it while he considers the question.
‘Ah no …’ he says. ‘Fifty years, sixty … a grand man …’
The glass trembles violently and the woman reaches out to steady his hand.
‘You could ask Sandra Keene,’ she says. ‘That’s her over by the door. Vinnie Boyle’s passed away, but that’s his daughter who married and is on the farm. You try asking her.’
Jimmy is tiring. He has had enough questions.
‘Thank you,’ says Clare. ‘Thank you for the singing and for …’
For her father the Hiker, the grand man, the artist with stone.
And for Sandra Keene, Vinnie Boyle’s daughter, who does indeed remember Mick Lacey, though she’s not hear
d his name nor thought of him in years. A small man, red haired, who’d arrive when the weather turned too cold for the road, and would leave again in the spring. A good worker, her father used to say, popular with the men, and with the girls too: she’d overhear her older sisters talking about how comical Mick was, how entertaining, how they’d near died laughing at his stories.
‘He broke a few hearts around here, I suspect,’ says Sandra Keene. ‘Yes. A few hearts in Killinaboy. Though he was rumoured to have a wife and children down in Kerry.’
Eleven
Cave/Cathedral/Carpark. That was what I came here to talk about to shadows seated in a darkened auditorium. ‘The wall as visionary locus.’ But all that became muddled, confused with other things: a woman in a high tower, liverworts, a song I didn’t understand. And a comical man who was reputed to have a wife and children in Kerry.
A wife and children in Kerry.
I must tell you now how I left Killinaboy early, paying Mrs Bunn before breakfast though she insisted on wrapping some toast and a boiled egg for the road. The Talbots had not yet emerged to sit in the dining-room window. There was just the murmur of their voices from the adjoining room as I packed to go, but now the sound had no power to discountenance me, for I knew what it signified. Liverworts.
I took my packed breakfast and drove away, the morning sun buttering the tops of green hills, steam rising from damp grass, some lambs standing by their mothers in a field, looking around at this amazing world they had tumbled into overnight, all sticky blood and yellow yolky afterbirth. They looked about themselves at grass and leaf from the wobble of new, black-stockinged legs.
I delayed phoning till I was through the drowsy Sunday morning outskirts of Limerick and turning to follow the road along the southern banks of the Shannon estuary into Kerry. The broad waters gleamed through glimpses of fresh leaf. In the lay-by, plastic bags festooned the hedge as if it were a party.
There are twenty-five Laceys in Kerry and the third one I tried was Michael’s son.
‘Michael Francis Lacey?’ the voice said, cautious at the full name that signified perhaps a never-to-be-repeated offer on cheap air fares, or the chance to purchase a time-share off the plans in some dodgy enclave by the Black Sea. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That was my father’s name. Who is this please?’
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