The Night Stages

by Jane Urquhart

  Kieran did not.

  “Then we must go up to my house to get one, because you will need to take some notes.”

  Kirby stood in the parlour. The importance of the lecture, he said, merited such formal surroundings. He told Kieran about the potholes of County Tipperary, the specifics of potholes on roads that ran by the rivers of Clare. Potholes in bog country, he explained, were of an entirely different nature; deeper, and more likely to shift from one day to the next. “Shape-changers,” he said. He spoke of the angry potholes of County Galway with their mouths of stone. Be wary, he warned, of the deceptive potholes of County Dublin. “They have macadamized roads there,” he said, “and because of this, a rider can become too confident of a smooth surface.” In County Cork, he confided, they have every kind of pothole that God can create. Those Cork holes, he maintained, were the kind of potholes that lay in wait for you like dogs hiding in a bush near the ends of lanes they are bound and determined to protect. “You never see them,” he warned, “until they catch you by the pant leg.” He could not speak about the North, he said, they being British potholes, but Kieran should be cautious indeed around that territory. “They have potholes, I’d say, like landmines, up there, veritable craters waiting for a cyclist from the south.”

  The idea of the North was not something Kieran had thought about. “Surely,” he said, “the Rás would not really go there, would it?”

  It had been a particular point of honour, Kirby insisted, for the Rás to penetrate the border at some time or another on one of the northern stages. During the inaugural Rás, he reminded him, the boys had carried the Irish flag with them, weaving in and out, through the six counties, and there had been much comment upon it by Orangemen and the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Quite a fracas had ensued, and these detours had been discouraged since.

  Kirby rose from his chair after the pothole lecture and walked toward one of the two shelves of books on either side of the hearth. “This,” he said, handing a dark leather volume to Kieran, “is what you must read to understand the formation and persistence of potholes.”

  Kieran looked at the spine. Geology of Ireland, it read.

  “Different rocks, different soils, give birth to varying potholes. Know what’s under you when you are riding. Remember the Ice Age, that fractional inching forward of everything you think is stable. Learn how water affects what’s under you. And never forget: everything, even hard stone, is moving slightly at all times.” The truth was, Kirby insisted, you could count on absolutely nothing. What began as a barely noticeable crack could blossom overnight into a gigantic sink hole that could swallow you and your bicycle in one gulp.

  Kieran hadn’t wanted to mention the irrefutable fact that he had never once seen Kirby on a bicycle, had never even heard of him riding at any time, but he couldn’t help himself. “How do you know all this?” he asked now. “Have you ridden on these roads?”

  Kirby looked surprised. “Of course not,” he said, “I am a fisherman. The only things I have ridden are the waves.”

  “So how do you know then?”

  Kirby looked out the window of his house and up the road that climbed to Bolus Head. “The donkey of the imagination,” he said, “can travel anywhere.” Then he began to recite. “To a Pothole,” he began,

  O gaping mouth, O teeth of stone

  Hiding in the path of those who go

  Down from their fields to town

  Wagon spiller, interrupter of wheels

  On roads that speed a shining bike along

  Between the mountains

  Under which you lurk

  With your lapful of yesterday’s rain

  And your shoes full of yesterday’s dirt

  A few days later, when a late-afternoon mist slid down the mountain and crept up to the windows, Kieran decided he would ask Gerry-Annie about Tadhg, having been too uncertain of what he had seen to bring the subject to Michael Kirby’s attention. The way the old couple had emerged from the fog, the feeling of sorrow attached to them, and his own sudden strength in relation to the impassable gate – all of this was still vivid in his mind.

  “Do you know one called Tadhg out on Bolus?” he asked her.

  “I do, Kieran. I did.” She was sitting by the hearth in a wooden chair with arms. It had a cushion on the seat and at the back, and arms on the sides, and was considered by her to be the height of luxury. The furniture in the room, all made out back by Gerry’s own grandfather, was dark around them, and concrete under their feet approached and withdrew depending upon the strength of the fire. “He, and Sheila, whom he married,” Annie continued. “They were people my own parents knew well. She died first, you know, and then him a year or so later. It was said he was found seated at the table with a knife and fork in his hands and no life in him. My mother said he was a terrible one for the food, always wanting something to eat at any time of the day or night. And then cautious about the fire, only allowing two or three pieces of turf a day – even in cold weather. He was always afraid,” Annie told Kieran, “that his turf stack wouldn’t last the winter, but he’d eat all the food in the house until there was nothing left and nowhere to get more.”

  “So they are dead.” Kieran tried to run this fact through his mind.

  “Yes, dead a good while, I’d say.”

  “But I opened a hard gate for them. They wanted it opened and I did that.”

  Annie sighed. “You would of course,” she said, unsurprised. “You are a good boy and you would do that for them. You would have to let Tadhg into a field, as he was so fond of his cows.” She pushed a strand of grey hair behind one ear, then folded her hands in her lap. “He was a great one for advice when he was alive, particularly on the subjects of grass and how to make a green field for the grass of two cows when it had all gone to rushes and furze and gorse. Oh, the fields Tadhg had! So ancient you couldn’t say what manner of man had built the walls. Not a corner on the lot of them. All sort of round, or like the shape of that platter.” She pointed to an oval of blue and white perched atop the dresser. “And the names on those fields: Watery Meadow, The Slope of the Lightning, Swift Dog Field, The Field of the Flying Cow. I suppose those fields are there yet.” She paused. “Are you listening to me, Kieran?”

  He moved his chair and it made a scraping noise. An affirmative sound came out of his mouth, but he wasn’t listening. Not really. He was thinking about the day of the gathering, the day of the scattering. He was trying to fit his mind into a thin place where Tadhg and his wife would be alive and dead at the same time, holding on to the day of the gathering for an unimaginable amount of time. Perhaps they had clung to the day of the gathering for so long the entrance to the fair was denied to them. Had he done them a favour when he had smashed open that rusted bolt? He remembered as well that the mist that enveloped them as they moved out toward the edge was bone-coloured, not the same white mist he had ridden through to get to the spot. The day of the fair is nothing but a thin ghost announcing the day of the scattering. He remembered Tadhg saying that. The day of the scattering could only mean the end of everything.

  “Oh, and I recall now the names of some fields Gerry’s father had,” Annie said. “The Hollow of the Little Saints, The Bed of the Lost Girl, The Haggard …”

  “Who was she,” he asked, “this lost girl?”

  Annie thought a while. “Someone from far-off, I think they said.” A piece of burnt turf fell softly through the grate and flame sprang from the place where it broke. “She had walked a long, long way, perhaps running from something, or maybe just one who had lost her way, and she lay down, I expect, to die in that field.”

  “And Gerry knew her then.” Kieran was picturing this lost girl. She was ancient and alive at the same time.

  “No he did not. Nor his father, or his grandfather. She came from another time. A time before.”

  How beautiful that would have been, Kieran thought, a girl lying spent and pale with the green grass around her, her hair a dark cloud beneath her head,
and the sound of the flocks coming across the fields in the evening. All strength gone and only submission left behind. He would have caught her on the edge of that and coaxed her back. Come here to me, he would have whispered, lifting her in his arms. Or he would have lain with her until his warmth bled into her and she opened her liquid eyes. It was Niall’s girl he was thinking of. She was the one he saw in his mind lying in that field. He would nurse her back with milk, as though she were an infant.

  That night he dreamt of Susan again as he had done on other nights since he had seen her. Sometimes in these dreams, though she had been herself, she had spoken with his mother’s own voice, admonishing him for not answering her call or for letting his attention drift. But this time she was like the girl who had come to Donal in the mountains, the girl whom Donal had lost to Africa. There was a river of sheep moving around her and flowing down the slope, and the stars were as strong as they had been on the night Donal had spoken of his own lost girl. Her skin was pure and glowing in an apparent absence of light, and grace was everywhere.

  He woke the following morning recalling his workmate’s words concerning the house where Susan lived, its position on the wooded hill that rose up behind the streets of the town, and he knew he must go there, believing that even the walls that surrounded her might have something to teach him. As he walked through the cottage and out into the faint beginnings of dawn he could hear Gerry-Annie snoring gently in her room behind the hearth. The light rain was soft on his face, and the crust of bread he had snatched as he passed the table was moist in his mouth. He swung his leg over the bicycle and set out, allowing gravity to pull him down toward the dreaming town. Soon he was standing on the pedals, propelling the bicycle up the incline through Carhan Wood. The rain had stopped and the low sun silvered the road and the holly bushes in the hedgerows. As he passed gate after gate, one dog after another announced his presence. They were answered in turn by those in the valley below. He had forgotten about the dogs: the ones that lay waiting in ditches, the ones who ran down lanes, those who sat in the yard with their backs turned and appeared to pay no attention to him at all except for the barking.

  In the end, as he came closer to where she lived, he merely slowed down in the vicinity of the two concrete gateposts that flanked the entrance to her lane, proceeding a mile or two farther along the road, as if he were going to the house of his workmate. He came to the end of the public road and a farm gate closed against him, and the sorrow of Tadhg, his separation from his beautiful cattle, touched him on the shoulder. The dogs had quieted now, but all courage had nevertheless fallen from him, leaving only the sorrow. There was nothing for it, he concluded, but to turn around and go down into the town, where he was still working on the sidewalks. When he passed the lane again, he allowed himself to look at the house he knew was hers, and as he did so, he saw the light above the door go cold and he vowed he would never return to the place.

  AMERICA

  Tam herself had never sought anyone, not even Niall, at least not outwardly. In fact, she was almost always the one being searched for, almost pursued. She wonders now if she had encouraged this, had somehow constructed a self that would be just out of reach. Plans to hunt her down and bring her to her senses were often being conceived of by adults during her childhood and early womanhood. Had she sometimes disappeared in hopes of being found? Is that what she was unconsciously hoping for now, that Niall, the great seeker, would begin to search for her?

  He had insisted that he had begun to look for his brother almost by accident during a trip to London a few years after Kieran disappeared. No one, not his father, not Gerry-Annie, knew where Kieran had gone, and no one had heard from him since. “A sad situation altogether,” Annie had apparently said. “He didn’t even take his bicycle.”

  She worried that he might have gone north to join the Provos, this being after the Rás and all the desperate politics she was certain had ridden alongside it, but neither Niall nor his father thought that was likely. “He doesn’t have a taste for politics,” Niall’s father had maintained. “It wouldn’t be like him at all.”

  Tam recalls Niall imitating Annie’s country intonations while he was speaking about his brother being gone. “Oh I hope he hasn’t gone and joined the fighting men and been killed,” he’d said in a high, womanish voice, throwing his hands in the air. “I’ve been like a mother to him!” She also remembers how he caught himself in the midst of that, and had apologized, saying that Annie was a treasure and that he shouldn’t be making light. He told her that Annie couldn’t understand why Kieran hadn’t taken the bicycle with him, why he had left it leaning against the wall, and had disappeared some time in the night. She couldn’t understand why he hadn’t wakened her to say goodbye. “This was a devastating loss for her,” Niall said.

  Niall hadn’t wanted to go to the conference as it involved crossing the channel in February, and he was a man who had known seasickness. But McWilliams had other matters to attend to and asked him specially to stand in for him. “While you are there,” the older man had said, “take another few days and see the place. Go see the John Constable oil studies of skies. They are in the Victoria and Albert Museum. No serious climatologist should miss them. That infinite variety.”

  It was while walking back to his hotel after looking at the Constables that Niall heard Irish being spoken near a worksite and, in a halting approximation of that language, he asked one of the men where he was from. The man, hardly more than a boy, answered in English, said he was from Clare, a farm near Shanavogh.

  Was there no work on the farm? Niall wanted to know.

  “Plenty of work,” the lad answered. “But no money.” The young labourer’s hands, resting on the shovel, were plum-coloured in the cold. “There’s loads of us Irish boys over here, all sending money home. There’s thousands of us.”

  Niall recalled Kieran telling him about the bicycles at Annie’s wall, how it was discovered they had all belonged to those who had left for England or America. No wonder Kieran had left the Purple Hornet at that spot.

  “Any Kerrymen?” he had asked.

  “God love us,” said the young man. “The Kerrymen are as thick on the ground as a snowfall after Christmas.”

  Niall continued then, knowing chances were slim. “Would you know my brother then, a man called Kieran Riordan?”

  The young man thought a bit, then shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’d say I do not.”

  An older man standing nearby suddenly entered the conversation. “You mean the Wheel.”

  Niall had no reply for that. “What do you mean, the Wheel?” he asked.

  “Damned if I know,” the man said, “it was a name he wanted for himself, evidently, or one the other boys gave him. But I saw he was Riordan. I saw that name once on a pay packet in his hand, and I know he was from South Kerry, as I am myself. We worked in the same gang here in this city. But he’s gone, since, to the Motorways in the north, and a good while back at that.”

  Much later Niall would think about the chances of having stopped at that precise site the moment he did, the strangeness of having all of Constable’s clouds still navigating through his mind while talking to the one man in a city of millions who knew something about where his brother was. “Motorways,” he said.

  “So they say.” The man pushed his shovel into the hole where he had been digging. As he walked away, Niall turned and called out to him, “Is there more than one motorway?”

  “There’s to be a whole cartload of them,” the labourer shouted back.

  And so began his interest in motorways. Niall told Tam that McWilliams had been bewildered and amused by this obsession, motorways being the one subject he knew nothing about, although, he conjectured, there was no doubt that climatologists were involved in the planning stages of these speed-tracks, as he called them. What falls from the skies and blows around the surfaces, McWilliams was never tired of reminding those near him, affects absolutely everything.

  One day McWillia
ms arrived at the station with news of the Preston Bypass. Eight and a half miles and a half a dozen bridges, he told Niall, just to avoid Preston. What made the place such an anathema that all this effort was put into not going near it? Pity the poor farmer, he’d said, whose house or byre was in the way. It was to have been finished months ago, but the weather – he’d laughed then – the weather had apparently got in the way.

  But the worksite around Preston had yielded nothing more than vague rumours when McWilliams had consulted the climatologist hired by the contractor. Some of these rumours were dire. The Wheel had tumbled from a bridge, or had been run over by one of the large noisy machines that ground back and forth in the vicinity. He had stolen a bicycle and ridden north to Scotland, where he had fallen into extreme drinking because of the easy availability of the malts. He had lost his wages in a poker game and had murdered the winner and was now mouldering in an English jailhouse. And at last, finally, someone said that Kieran Riordan had been banned from work on future motorways – the crime that precipitated this was not specified – and had gone to America.

  Motorways, thinks Tam now, not for the first time. The mysterious brother might have worked on sites controlled by her father. “Everything you pull out of the earth needs to be taken somewhere else.” She remembers her father saying this, or something to this effect. She thinks of the demolished village. “Anything that moves forward, anything at all progressive, leaves something raw and wounded behind it. Look at America.” Had he said that too? Or was this observation simply her own inner voice, instructing her?