by Ian McDonald
“No one likes you. I don’t like you—I don’t like you at all.”
“Well, you just have to like me, because we’re sisters.”
“No, we’re not,” gasped The Shite. “You’re not really my sister. That’s what the nice hurdy-gurdy man with the monkey told me. You’re not my sister at all—not a real sister, like Jo-Jo is, and Mummy isn’t your Mummy and Daddy is not your Daddy and you’re not really their daughter.” The Shite froze, hands to mouth, conscious that she had crossed the line between righteous indignation and calculated cruelty; moved into a region where cause and effect no longer behaved in strict ratio to each other—a state of minute action and colossal reactions.
Jessica’s face was pale, as if drained of life by a vampire. Her lips moved faintly.
“What? What? What are you saying? What are you saying?”
Hearing the swelling strain of hysteria, The Shite slammed her bedroom door with a sob of fear. The sound of key turning in lock was uncannily loud.
The telephone rang.
Numb to everything but the demand of the ringing telephone, Jessica went downstairs to answer.
“Hello? Caldwell residence.” Her mother insisted she call it that. It lent an air of gentility.
“Hello?” A woman’s voice, incredibly far away. “Is that Jessica?”
“Who is this?”
“Is that Jessica?”
“Who is this?”
“Is that you, Jessica?”
“Yes, this is Jessica. Who is this?”
“This is your mother, Jessica. Your mother.”
“Hello? Hello? Hello…”
“Your mother, Jessica. Your mother.”
The heat in the hall was stifling.
“What is it?”
“Remember, Jessica. Remember.”
The line went dead,
“Hello? Hello! Hello…”
Seated on the threadbare carpet, worn by the passage of many lives, she remembered.
It had been as if her life were a broken bridge and she had stood on the edge of remembering, looking across the gap too wide to leap at the part of her life that was unremembered. Then the words were spoken and they were the keystone that completed the broken arch, and she was free to cross over into the unremembered and remember it. One foot after another, she had made the crossing and all the lies that had made up her life rose before her like startled birds. She saw, she heard, she touched, she remembered.
She had loved them with a child’s intuitive, uncritical love, and all the time they had known it had not been their right. They had not deserved Mother-love, Father-love. Mother. Father. Sisters. She ripped away their names, their titles, and left them pure identityless faces, bundles of formalised relationship without substance. One short, clean stroke had cleaved the threads that bind individuals into a family.
Adopted. Adopted. The great whirling machinations of betrayal. The fanlight above the door cast a brightening rose of light across her; short summer’s night at its end.
15
WHEN SHE WOKE IN the morning they were there. She struggled out from under the Army greatcoat, picked the straw from her hair and clothes, opened the shuttered hay barn window, and they were waiting for her. The birds. The field before the barn was white with massive, malevolent, yellow-eyed gulls; the hedges and telegraph wires were heavy with starlings. Rooks rattled their wings in the branches of the trees; on the telegraph poles, ravens fluffed their feathers and clacked their beaks. Every eye was fixed on her. She watched more glide in through the low dawn mist to join the vigil. She heard Damian moving in the still-dark recesses of the hay barn, preparing for this day’s journey.
“Damian, come and look at this.”
He looked up, saw her silhouetted against a rectangle of morning sky.
“Jesus God, would you get away from that window! You want everyone in the county to see you?”
“I was right. They are following me.”
“For God’s sake, girl!” In one blink of movement, he crossed to the window and pulled Jessica away. She sat down heavily on a hay bale.
“You bastard, you hurt my arm!”
He closed the window.
“I thought we had an understanding; we can’t compromise on security. You want to get away, you follow orders. My orders.”
“I’m not so sure I want to get away so bad with you issuing your orders orders orders all the time.”
“You seemed sure enough yesterday.”
“Yesterday was yesterday. Today I am tired and cold and hungry and I feel filthy and this is no fun at all, Damian.”
“It was never part of the agreement that it had to be fun.”
“God, I must look awful. I need to do something with my face. Go away. Just go away. Leave me alone, all right?”
Damian shrugged and went to hacking off hunks of crusty bread with a clasp knife. Jessica rooted out a hand mirror and sat examining her countenance. Realising the ridiculousness of what she was doing, she snapped the compact shut. Like her anger, it had been a mask for her apprehension. She had thought that in escaping she had hauled herself from an increasingly inexorable stream of events moments before it crashed over the falls into panic and chaos. She had thought that in running away she was taking control of her life. She had merely extricated herself from the torrent of events to find herself carried along by another. Perils of Pauline. Tied to the tracks, with the express approaching.
She was gone before the milkman’s cart came clinking on its rounds, taking only as much of her as she could indisputably call her own, stuffed into a carpetbag. No note; traitors did not deserve notes. With the milkmen and the breadmen and the postmen and the newspaper boys, she walked the Victorian red-brick avenue of Ranelagh and Rathmines until Hannah’s Sweet Shop put up its shutters and she could pencil a message for Damian. He would not call there until half past four. She would find some way to pass the time. The aged Miss Hannah passed comment about her being up early this morning. Jessica did not hear. Her head was full of the rushing, pounding wings of betrayal. She spent the day in Pearse Station, dividing the hours between having protracted cups of tea in the station buffet and watching the infinitesimally slow progress of the hour hand around the face of the station clock from a bench on the platform. The sun moved in concert across the glass roof. Pigeons lived up there, under the roof, in the girders and pillars. Every passing train set the ones new to life in the station flapping and beating at the grimy glass in panic, steam billowing about them.
Damian arrived with the weary end of the commuter rush southward for Booterstown, Blackrock, Dun Laoghaire, and points south to Bray. He saw the carpetbag, the stony fixity of her face. They embraced under the clock. Over bacon and egg sandwiches she told him about the lies, the years filled with lies and pretense and falsehood.
“I had to get away, Damian. What’s true, what’s false, who I can trust, who I can’t trust, who is lying, who is telling the truth; I don’t know anymore. I don’t know…
“Take me with you. You said you would, you said you wanted to, more than anything. Take me away with you to the hills and the mountains—somewhere where it will all stop hurting. You said all I had to do was say the word; I’m saying it now. Wherever you’re going, whatever you’re doing, I want to come with you. Damian… you’re all I’ve got.”
He was not looking at her. His attention, the attention of every southbound commuter, was fixed on the roof. It was covered, every last inch, with the round, feathered bodies of birds.
“Now, Damian. Now. We’ve got to go…”
She led him by the hand down the station steps into Westland Row, heels clattering on the cast-iron stairs. Above them, the birds rose from their roost in a rush and clash of wings.
It was full dark before a car would stop. Jessica was footsore and half delirious with hunger and fatigue from twelve hitchless miles along the Mullingar Road. Damian had ruled out public transport; the police were certain to have a description of Jessica, and bus
and train stations were the first places they would check. Hitching lifts carried a degree of danger. With twelve miles gone and the night close and cold upon her, Jessica had sat down on her carpetbag and refused to take another step. Twenty minutes later the headlamps of Mr. Peter Toohey, travelling salesman of Tomelty & Malloy agricultural implements, Multyfarnham, had swept across the fugitive couple. While Mr. Peter Toohey, travelling salesman of Multyfarnham, made lewd innuendos about what a young couple might be up to on the Mullingar Road at half past eleven, Jessica surreptitiously tore at the railway buffet sandwiches she had stashed in her carpetbag and guzzled red lemonade liberated in the name of Irish republicanism from a parked door-to-door delivery van in Chapelizod. Damian instructed Mr. Peter Toohey to drop them at a featureless farm gateway just beyond Kinnegad crossroads, which Mr. Peter Toohey did, though not without questions, none of which were graced with an answer.
Only when Mr. Peter Toohey’s red taillights had vanished in the direction of Multyfarnham did Damian feel it was secure enough to mention the safe farm. “We’ll spend the night here, then go on tomorrow.” He helped Jessica over the gate.
“Where to?” They picked a careful course across a weed-infested cow pasture. The cows ruminated and farted with bovine gentleness.
“Sligo. I have friends there. They can shelter us while we decide what to do.” The barn lay across a second gate and field. From the farmhouse came the sound of the wireless and the yelping grizzle of suspicious dogs. Jessica stopped by the stagnant drinking trough.
“Listen.”
“What?”
“Listen… I can hear them. I can’t see them, but they’re here.”
“What?”
“The birds. They’ve followed us. They’re here.”
“Nonsense. Birds don’t fly at night.”
“These birds do.”
“Come on, will you, and stop standing there gawking like an eejit. You want the farmer to catch us?”
“I thought you said this was a safe farm.”
“It was; back in twenty-one, twenty-two.”
“You’re trying to tell me they allowed eight-year-olds in the IRA?”
“Things don’t change much in the country.”
“Just how safe is this safe house?”
She could just discern a facial expression in the dim sky-glow.
“Safe-ish.”
Safe-ish. It had been a mindless impulse, to put space between herself and the hurt of a betrayal that was still too tender to fully admit, but that was what she wanted, to be driven by impulse—her own impulse, for once, not the endless whirring machinations of others. Damian came, cautiously, with bread and a map.
“No toast?”
“No butter, no marmalade, no fire.”
She ripped at the bread with her small white teeth. Damian measured off distances on his map with his fingers.
“Will we get to Sligo today, do you think?”
“Maybe. With luck. Have you thought about what you want to do when you get there?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care. Might just turn right around and go straight home. I need time to think, to sort out what I feel, who I am.”
The sun was low and brassy in the mist as they stole away from the hay barn through the gathered birds. Every click, every clack, every rustle of feathers and flap of wing, sent Jessica’s pulse racing. They passed down a boreen that led to the main road. The hedgerows were sharp and brilliant with beaks and eyes. As they turned into the road, they heard, all at once, the storm of wings rising. They did not look behind them. For half an hour after, a river of birds passed overhead into the northwest.
16
DAMN CALDWELL! WHAT MAD notion had possessed the man to try on the glasses? We had been within minutes of them. Even now they could be approaching Sligo while we remain sequestered in the Mullingar County Hotel waiting for Caldwell to regain normal vision, if he ever does. Every half hour we remove the heavy bandages from his eyes, but even the darkened hotel room is agony to him. Tiresias cannot predict how long it will be before he is sufficiently recovered to move. Damn the man!
Obviously, we cannot leave him in the room and continue the pursuit ourselves. Neither can I carry it on alone, as we will have need of Tiresias and Gonzaga’s arcane abilities. They cannot go ahead without me as they cannot drive. Indeed, they seem loath to use any mode of transport more sophisticated than their own two feet. So we remain stuck in this down-at-heel country hotel like some Marx Brothers comedy. I was a fool to have let Caldwell accompany us.
“Guilt” is not a word with which psychologists have any truck, yet I feel guilty. She had left no note, but I was certain our sessions together were the direct cause of her flight. I had been so careful, plugging and caulking every chink and crevice, yet those constrained memories had seeped out. Memories not merely of her forgotten childhood and its traumas, but, more perilously, of the inheritance she has from her true mother. Responsibility, guilt: psychologist, heal thyself.
Jessica had been late for her appointment. My anticipation had been high, almost feverish, of being able to induce, at will, the state of primal consciousness in which the human mind interacts with matter and energy. I can only describe the sensation as the intellectual vertigo of standing upon a cliff edge overlooking a new landscape, vast and exhilarating, awaiting one’s tentative explorations.
And, of course, she was late.
Twenty minutes became forty, became an hour and a half. I was sufficiently agitated to call Mangan’s Restaurant, where she worked, and was informed that she had not been present for work that day. I called the Caldwell house—perhaps she had been taken ill and had neglected to tell Miss Fanshawe. Forboding began to grow in me when I learned that she had left the house before any of them had been awake, though it was not an unusual thing in itself. I told Mr. Caldwell of my call to the restaurant, and, voice suddenly filled with concern, he asked if I could call around as soon as possible. Having no further appointments that evening, I told him I would be present forthwith. Just as I was replacing the receiver, there was a loud knock at the door. I rushed to admit the visitor.
“Jessica,” I said, “what kept you? Where have you been? Come in.”
“I beg your pardon?”
In the corridor were two old men, two tramps. One was short and squat, like a toad, with a dishevelled mop of oily black ringlets; the other was tall and thin, almost a bird, wearing the most extraordinary pair of spectacles I have ever seen.
They introduced themselves as Tiresias and Gonzaga. Tiresias, the taller one, explained that they were searching for a Miss Jessica Caldwell—“the young lady” he called her, in a curiously archaic Anglo-Irish accent, like a seventeenth-century beau—and had traced a minor node of Mygmus energy to this place. Could I assist them in their search? They had information of the gravest import to impart to her.
It was as the tall, thin one was speaking that awareness dawned on me: here, standing outside my office door, were two actual mythic manifestations. These were no fleeting elfin shadows in Bridestone Wood, no half-real, half-wishful images captured on a photographic plate. Though their appearance and demeanour allied them more closely to the Lords of Little Egypt and the Counts of Con-Dom than the Ever-Living Ones and the Queen of Air and Darkness, these were faeries—the incarnations of the Watchman and the Spinner of Dreams.
I replied that Jessica had been undergoing a course of hypnotic therapy—obviously, this “node of Mygmus energy” to which they had alluded—and that she was long overdue for today’s appointment. Indeed, and I could not say why I felt the sudden compulsion to say what I did, she had been absent from work and missing from home all day. From the way they looked at each other, the smaller one saying something in a language that sounded like Russian, to which the taller one nodded gravely, I knew that they suspected something untoward was afoot.
We drove at once to Belgrave Road.
The family awaited me in the living room, arranged as if in a Victorian famil
y snapshot. The sullen tautness of the atmosphere indicated to me that some altercation had taken place minutes before my arrival. The younger daughters seemed on the verge of tears. Mrs. Caldwell was the very picture of the weary and distraught Hollywood vamp, down to the cigarette clenched nervously between two fingers; Mr. Caldwell’s expression one of grim resolution in the face of withering revelation, like a member of the Russian royal family on the night of the Revolution.
I had taken the precaution of leaving Tiresias and Gonzaga in the car—they did not seem much to mind. Gonzaga busied himself down the back of the seats while Tiresias, outrageous spectacles on nose, surveyed minutely the front of the Caldwell residence. Their presence would only have provoked questions I did not desire to answer at that time.
“Go on, tell Dr. Rooke what you told us,” Caldwell said. The barely restrained tears flowed as first the older daughter, a dark-haired, just-blooming beauty called Jocasta, and the younger, a child of almost inspirational plainness, like contemporary Catholic saints, named Jasmine, told their tales.
When they had concluded, I could well appreciate Caldwell mere and pere’s expressions of numb bewilderment.
That there had been a man friend Jessica had been meeting clandestinely while her mother thought her visiting friends, or me, even more astoundingly, for over a month was shocking; that this male friend (if Jocasta’s testimony was to be trusted, and it seemed reasonable to me that Jessica had had at least one confidante with whom she could be wholly truthful) should have been a member of an IRA Active Service Unit was amazing. But what most staggered, and I will admit, alarmed me, was the younger daughter’s disclosure that she had been approached by the bizarre figure of a blind hurdy-gurdy man who seemed to be in possession of every detail of Jessica’s life, including the secret of her adoption. It was Jasmine who had broken this lifelong secret—she and Jessica had never liked each other, and their mutual antagonism had erupted in the devastating revelation of Jessica’s adoption on her return from an evening in the company of her IRA lover. Chastened, young, plain Jasmine fled the room in tears.