by Ian McDonald
The radio alarm wakes her with a cry, and a start, and a shudder. The duvet is a sodden, scrunched huddle in the corner of the bed. Grinding dreams. Sweat dreams. It is always bad, the morning after. It can take all day for her hands to stop shaking. Radio KRTP-FM news, headlines on the hour, every hour: ethnic unrest in the Soviet provinces, resignations in the British cabinet, Hurricane Hugo blows the roof off a church and kills everyone inside. Weather: cold front moving in across the country from the northwest; high of 12 Celsius, 52 Fahrenheit; wind slight to moderate; rain by midafternoon. Good morning! And today’s Radio KRTP-FM Listener File is sent in by Kevin McLoughlin from out there in Dundrum. Hi, Kevin, hope you’re listening. Star sign: Capricorn; favourite drink: Harp Lager; favourite food: ham and pineapple pizza; favourite band: Dire Straits; favourite film: Dirty Dancing; favourite actor: Sly Stallone; favourite actress: Cher; favourite car: white Austin Metro GTI.
For these disclosures, Kevin McLoughlin from out there in Dundrum wins a Radio KRTP-FM sunstrip for his white Austin Metro GTI and would they play “Money For Nothing” for his girlfriend Anne-Marie. Surely will, Kevin McLoughlin from out there in Dundrum.
Guitars pick and strum and she makes tea, Chinese tea, scalding hot, almost flavourless. Muscles she did not know she had are dully furious with her. Must be getting out of condition. She should get back into training—cycle some, swim, work out, practice down at the dojo.
Enye MacColl. Twenty-wise. Five foot-wise. One twenty-wise pounds. Pure black hair—the sort that makes you want to bury your face in it and breathe deeply, imagining that you will smell the freshness of your first adolescent love again. Smooth olive skin; a genetic throwback to ancestors swept ashore with the Armada, hints of even elder stock, the Firbolg, the dark mesolithics swept away by the red-haired, freckle-faced Celts, the First Come. The black olive eyes of an elder race; devastating in casual glances, cat-unpredictable, cat-playful in intimacy. Like all women of character, she can be both beautiful and ugly in successive instants. If you saw her on the street, you would look again and think, What an interesting woman. Enye MacColl.
The light of her answering machine is glowing. Three calls.
Call one: Jaypee Kinsella (fated to pass through the world reduced to his initials; even Enye does not know what the Jay and the Pee stand for), perilously post-party: we’ve got to do something, darling, about those station idents: the Blessèd Phaedra is rumbling.
Call two: Saul, inquiring about her enjoyment of the party last night (she had not passed on the invitation to him; she knows he despises advertising parties) and her availability for dinner that night, dress formal, pick up eight sharp, ring back if not convenient.
Call three: her brother. Ewan. He needs to talk to her. Can she meet him for lunch at one o’clock?
If she hits the shower running, she can just about make it.
The place they have arranged to meet is a wrought-iron and glass snackery on the top level of the glass and wrought-iron mall they built on top of the old flea market. People slide up and down on escalators. They look nervous, like atheists in a cathedral. Everything is open plan, plate glass and delicate filigree, transparent. That is why the people look nervous—they fear that, unbeknownst, their bodies and souls may have become as transparent as glass. Enye thinks of a megalithic Ministry of Shopping in some Capitalist Totalitarian Dystopia. She picks at her green salad, toys with her Perrier. Her hands are still trembling from the psychic and physical strain. Her brother thinks she is hung over. She wills her hands to be still. Make your everyday stance the combat stance; make the combat stance your everyday stance.
Neither wants to say the first word, but a first word must be spoken. And a second. And a third.
“She asks about you.”
“That’s nice of her.”
“She worries about you.”
“She has nothing to worry about.”
“She’s not well, you know.”
Her fingers are steady on the glass, as if they were holding a sword.
“What is it this time? Shadow in the brain, palpitation of the heart, dreadful lumps in the breast? Nothing trivial, I’m sure.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
“She is our mother, for God’s sake. Your mother.”
“And he is our father. Your father.”
Heads are turning at the closer tables. Their hopes of sibling strife will be disappointed. They are like two entrenched armies. They long ago ceased to be able to seriously damage each other. They long ago ceased to have anything they could say to each other. Enye catches a gum-chewing waitress’s eye and pays the bill. Ewan leaves. At the edge of earshot, he turns.
“She really is ill, you know.”
The escalators carry him down into the throng of glass people.
The masters of strategy, in their books and teachings, mention that it is possible to defeat an opponent and still lose the war.
She last saw her mother the year before, at the funeral. They had almost spoken, afterward, when the people were walking back from the graveside along the neatly tailored stone avenues to their cars. She had seen her mother clutch her brother’s arm for support and, seeing her suddenly weak, no longer ageless, mortal, would have spoken, had there been anything she could have said. The moment tarried, stretched beyond the elastic limit of time, and passed, unspoken. She had turned away and Ewan was leading her mother away through the aisles of precise cypresses and the headless pillars of young Victorians felled before Eminence.
The death had been sudden, but not without her grandmother’s customary grace. In the summer months the old woman had Consuela, the semiresident, semilegal Spanish home help move the wicker chair in which she did all her illustrating down beyond the Stone Gardens to the shade of the trees. It was there, in that chair, that she crossed the bar between life and death with a half drunk cup of lemon tea on the grass beside her and her favourite calico cat on her knee. Consuela had gone to call her in when the shadows began to grow long and the evening cool and had introduced the sole note of gracelessness into the dying by waking Ballybrack from its teatime drowsiness with operatic Hispanic shrieking and keening.
The calico cat had jumped down and run off through the Stone Gardens and was never seen again.
The service had possessed the dignified festivity of a bouquet of dried flowers. The day of the funeral was a final celebration of summer before a damp and dowdy autumn. The church was packed with the wonderful people the old woman (no, not old—to die at seventy-three is to die having barely sipped the pleasures of old age) had known in her terrible, terrible years as an illustrator: artists and poets and writers and critics and publishers and dancing teachers and bass saxophonists and retired missionaries and pensioned off chorus-line girls and faded madams. Enye had meandered from conversation to conversation, listening to the unself-conscious eulogising. She was sure Ballybrack Parish Church had never seen so many sinners under its roof at once. One pass of the collection plate would have restored the rafters, renovated the organ, and paid for a new hassock in every pew.
After the interment (none of the claustrophobic dread of spadefuls of earth thumping on the coffin; rawer, a sense of eager return to an elemental state of mineral existence) and the inspection of the floral tributes, which were many and glorious—one, from the publishers, was in the shape of Miss Miniver Mouse, her most enduring creation—Enye had noticed two figures standing some way apart from the throng. They were dressed in tattered mourning of an archaic design—frock coats, top hats held respectfully, heads bowed. They looked like undertakers fallen on hard times. One was short and squat, the other tall and thin—relics from the Golden Age of Screen Comedy, incarnations of celluloid. She would have spoken with them, for they struck a hemichord of recognition, but then the artists poets writers critics publishers bass saxophonists retired missionaries chorus-line girls faded madams had parted, leaving her mother reaching for her brother’s arm, and the moment was
sacrificed.
When next she had looked, they were gone. But her half-recognition resolved into a memory.
As far as she can trace the line of memory, the house in Ballybrack is there. Inextricably connected to it are memories of sea gulls calling in the morning; the smell of sea; endless days of endless summer when summers were summers; the dusty, tan, earth-sweat smell of hot days; the taste of cherryade and the sting of sunburn on the backs of the legs; the vinyl smell of the inflatable paddling pool; the lurk of a calico cat in the rhododendrons on star-filled evenings. It was a house that suggested associations with eminent people. It could have been a judge’s house, or a surgeon’s, or a rural dean’s—white walls, black paintwork, tall privet hedges that screened it from the road, and a swathe of crunching gravel. Martins nested every summer in the eaves of the double garage that smelled of stale oil and lawn mowers. In her vaguest memories, Grandfather Owen sequestered himself in the conservatory to smoke and read the racing papers. Behind the house, the garden, guarded from without by great ashes and beeches, maintained its own small secrets in shrub-enclosed bays and coves, a wellspring of endless fascination for the young Enye. After her grandfather’s death, her grandmother had embarked upon her transformations and constructions. Behind a screen of rhododendrons, in an intimate corner, a spiral maze had been built from pieces of broken crockery. Fragments of willow pattern, pieces of Meissen dairymaids and blue delft windmills, shards of Coronation mugs, the upper half of Edward VII’s face, a headless Queen Elizabeth II dandling an infant Bonnie Prince Charlie on her knee, the grimly righteous cow-features of Queen Victoria, inviting the curious to follow its convolutions inward. From the china maze you passed behind the bed of asters and ageratums grown for the purposes of floromancy to a crazy-pathed atrium from which rose a small Babel of stone towers—hand-sized flat slabs of slate piled without cement into pillars the highest of which was slightly taller than eight-year-old Enye and the shortest barely reached her ankle. From thence you passed by way of hollyhocks and purple heliotrope to a specimen copper beech, its branches hung with old watches, broken carriage clocks, dials, escapements, hairsprings; shards and orts of broken time. And thence onward, into other gardens within the garden.
The only justification Grandmother MacColl ever gave for her constructions was the one Enye instinctively comprehended—that their purpose lay in their arrangement, not their elements. She knew that in those gardens within gardens one became aware of things one had not been aware of before. The china maze rewarded the one who followed it correctly to its centre with the ability to see the wind. Or what she thought was the wind—streams and rivers in the air not quite visible, not quite not. In the bottle garden, where green, white, brown, blue, yellow glass was planted in the earth like flowers, the spirit was one of stillness—the essential quiet that lay at the root of all dynamism reflected and magnified by the optics of the embedded bottles. Copper wind chimes fashioned from lengths of plumbing pipe suspended from the branches of an old, dried, magic apple tree called up a sense of simultaneously expanding to sky-dwarfing proportions and dwindling to a size so infinitesimal you were in danger of falling between the crumbs of soil, while among the stone towers Enye felt certain that if she turned around quickly enough she would see that the stone pillars were the towers and skyscrapers of another city in another world, its crazy-pathed boulevards bustling with golden chariots and the ox-drawn pantechnicons of strolling mummers.
But she knew she could never turn around fast enough so she created that city in her imagination, the capital of the imaginary land of Stone Gardania. On those long summer stays, when Something At Home that was never named brought Enye and five-year-old Ewan on indefinite visit, Stone Gardania slowly emerged from the wholly imaginary into the substantial: a nation state, with geography, history, economy, and politics. She created a citizenry out of novelty erasers in the shape of cute dragons or koalas; pencil-top rubber monsters with popping eyes, lolling tongues, fangs, and waggling tentacles, and plastic models of diverse breeds of dog from cereal packets. Overnight, new housing mushroomed in the streets between the stone towers. By constitution every citizen was allocated a yoghurt carton with a door cut in it as a highly desirable weatherproof residence. A pebble on top of the carton kept the home from blowing away in the wind. Stone Gardania’s more prominent citizens, the members of the Hegemonic Council, lived in bijou maisonettes made from carefully piled stones atop the pillars. Access to street level was by toy helicopter. The highest level of all was reserved for the Sargon Raymondo I of Stone Gardania, a genial three-centimetre yellow dragon—that is, until over-rough handling of his Sargonic Majesty caused his head to fall off, whereupon the greatest surgeon in the land—a rubber bat called Black Swoop—performed a lifesaving operation known as a pinography, involving securing the Sargonic head to neck by a sewing pin from Grandmother MacColl’s sewing basket. Later refinements to the operation utilised laser power—a beam of light focused through a hand-lens, capable of fusing rubber or plastic. The operation was only ever used experimentally on prisoners: Enye provided the agonised screams herself.
In those periods of time away from the white house in Ballybrack, between Something Happening at Home, and Something Happening Again, Enye plotted out the future history of Stone Gardania in exacting detail. A terrorist group calling itself the Nying Nyong Guerrillas, led by one Percy Perinov, a pencil-top anthropomorphised pear she had never liked, wearing a modelling-clay sombrero and moustache, attempted a coup in the streets of Stone Gardania. Only the valiant intervention of the ISF, the dread and exceedingly secret Internal Security Force, in their painted-on black uniforms, rescued the Sargon from a fate beyond even the power of a pinography to redeem and the grateful populace of Stone Gardania from the tyranny of an organisation whose party anthem was: “We will prevail in the end, ’cause we are so much better than you.”
And when next Something Happened, with the shouting voices from the room downstairs that sounded like animals biting at each other, the Battle of Stone Gardania was fought on a chilly October morning with Enye partisan to both sides (slightly biased toward the Sargonese forces) hurling matches tipped with flaming chunks of fire lighter through the air. The official Stone Gardanian newspaper Die Draken (“The Dragons”: rubber dragon erasers formed a powerful oligarchy in Stone Gardanian society) reported in depth the trial of Percy Perinov, in his suave hat and moustache, and in rather gratuitous detail, his subsequent execution: sealed in a Curiously Strong Peppermints tin and smelted to death by her late grandfather’s gas blowtorch.
The game grew more elaborate—though she would have been highly affronted to hear her Unfolding history called a game: Stone Gardania was more solid and real to her than what passed for a world beyond the privet hedges and screening beeches. From their yoghurt cartons and maisonettes, Stone Gardanians went roving out on the tops of toy cars to colonise her Grandmother’s other constructions and transformations and weld the hegemony of individualistic provinces into the Stone Gardanian Empire. As the process of Empire-building unfolded, she noticed that the character of the provinces, and the colonists who settled there, reflected the character of the gardens they occupied. The citizens of the bottle garden, which she called Glassonia, tended toward philosophic introspection and lived in old beer glasses half buried on their sides in the soil. The Glassonians were an honest and angelic race, peace-loving and unwarlike. Not so the colonists of the magic apple tree: Tubular-Bell-Land, Enye christened it. Their city was a place of little platforms and tables, helicopters and parachutes. A bellicose breed the Tubular Bellians, given to displays of martial might and shouting. They were the most rebellious of the Stone Gardanian provinces. When ultimately faced with the ISF in black, matches ready to fire from the muzzles of toy howitzers, they broke ranks and fled. Big on the outside, little on the inside. Yet when the stream that marked the outermost edge of Grandmother MacColl’s domain burst its banks in the Great Flood of ’72, it was the Tubular Bellians who came to the aid of
stricken Stone Gardania, swooping down in their helicopters and jet packs made from empty ink cartridges and rubber bands to effect the daring rescue of Stone Gardanians swept to almost certain doom in their desirable yoghurt-carton residences.
“It’s like the Stone Gardens suggest the stories,” she said to her grandmother. It was a wet Wednesday in the Christmas holidays; nearly seven Ewan was banging on a piano three rooms away. Undeterred, possessed of an almost beatific tranquility, Grandmother MacColl was at her drawing desk working on roughs for a cover for Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. Since those rude, raw, beautiful drawings for the leather-bound collector’s edition of Ulysses, she had gloried in the title of Enfant Terrible of Irish Illustration—one critic had called her rendition of Molly Bloom’s sexual soliloquy a “Brutal, obscene raspberry to ten centuries of book illustration, from the Book of Kells onward”—though she was best known for her Miss Miniver Mouse series of children’s books, which she produced under the name of French. When word had broken that the Laurel French of the children’s section was the Jessica MacColl of that book, not a few libraries had withdrawn Miniver Mouse from their shelves.
“I don’t have to think up anything, it’s already there, written somewhere else, and I just act it out. Does this make sense?”
Grandmother Jessica turned from the pool of light the swan-necked brass drawing lamp spilled over her board to pour tea for two, and a Viennese fancy.
“It’s like everything that can happen has happened, and that everything that has happened has happened only because it is going to happen.”
Nearly twelve, she sipped her tea, fingers sticky with yellow fondant.
“Do you know what I like about it? It’s that I feel safe. Looked after. Like someone is watching me who understands and approves and wants to join in, but can’t for some reason.”
Grandmother Jessica crossed to the french window to pull the curtain. She passed, hand on sash cord, to look at her gardens, where the short December day was rapidly diminishing.