‘A week,’ he said.
‘A week,’ I said, and felt the coolness of the air rush against the palm of the hand he had let go. He headed out the driveway and, with a flying wave of the great flag of his hand, was gone.
It took me two minutes to decide. And another ten to take the money from the jam jar, put it with what I had saved, take my coat, a small carrier bag with a jumper, socks and underpants, and head for the train station. My father was walking, hitching an improbable lift from any car whose driver was bemused or curious enough to pull over for him. I took the bus, reasoning the expense against the necessity of catching the same train as he. I sat upstairs in the front seat and peered down into the slow moving traffic for any sight of the long, thin figure carrying his bundle like a ragman along the paths that led into the city. But there was no sign of him. At the quays the bus pulled over and I stepped out into the tremendous flux of colour and noise that was Dublin in the summertime. High clouds sailed across the sun, moving green shadows along the river. My heart was racing. What if he was already ahead of me, already in his seat on the train watching the platform going slowly backwards? I stood off the crowded path and began running.
The train left at ten to ten. I sat in the back carriage on the side farthest from the platform and watched the last stragglers flapping awkwardly past with plastic bags, rucksacks and small cases. By ten to ten my father had not passed the window. There was an announcement: This was the train for Nenagh, Limerick and Ennis. And then, the shutting of doors all along the train, a call, a whistling, a ticket collector joking to someone out the opened window of the door, and the first three jolts, the quick stiff shudders that were the releasing of the brakes and the kicking of the engine as we shook then rattled then rolled past the end of the platform out of the station and away on a curving rhythmic beating into the countryside. We slid into country I had never seen, past old trackside houses with their washing lines and small gardens, places printed with the noise and life of trains, the clockwork regularity of the whoosh throughout their days and nights. Children didn’t look up or wave. Beyond them, the newer suburbs of the city, the white blocks of life neither villages nor towns, just rows upon rows of houses, attached, detached and semi-detached. It was half an hour before we were past them, before the green outmeasured the grey and the banks beyond the windows ran up into the tangled briars and ditches of the fields of Kildare, then Laois. The ticket collector came through the carriages swaying over the punching of paper holes and telling Spanish students to take their feet down off seats. There was no smoking, he said, pacing through wafting screens of smoke and banging the flat of his fist against a back window to let in the louder rush of the wind and the tracks and the smells of woodbine and hay. It was all new to me. I sat beside a small woman in a big coat who kept her hand on her handbag at all times, nodding into the drumming rhythms to dream of thieves, suddenly jolting upright with a cry until she looked down and found the bag was safe in the sweat of her hands and she could close her eyes and be robbed in peace again. She said nothing to me. I was too excited to sleep. I was too afraid that my father was not on the train, and too afraid that he was. What I intended to do in either case I am not certain. The magic of the train would resolve it, I imagined, the newness and innocence of arrival, the fresh beginning, all that. I sat back and stared out the window. We moved into the middle of the country, a great green immensity rolling into hills and mountains that wore the shadows of the sky. Cows were still shapes in the landscape. The sense of space was incredible, the largeness, the openness of it all, the distance that stretched across the fields drawing me out, longing to be there running or sitting or lying down into the infinitesimal sweetness of the summer grass. As the train sped on, ever further westwards, the landscape became more extravagantly remote, the sky bigger. The rattle of the tracks was a trance, and after a while the flashing of the countryside past the window slowed into a steady rolling, a sweeping panorama that ten carriages ahead, on a southside window, I could imagine my father staring into. For two hours we moved in the same dream. Then, at Limerick, we changed for Ennis. ‘Change here,’ boomed the ticket collector, bigfooting his way down through the smoke and banging open the window two cold priests had closed.
Delaying, peering from the doorway the length of the platform, I was last off the train. Clutching my bag I hurried down and stood beside a pillar that cried out in alarm as the small woman in the big coat popped out from its other side and held her handbag to her chest. I apologized and hid myself.
There were less than forty passengers for Ennis, a little clustering of country people standing expectantly. I looked for my father and couldn’t see him. Then, slowly, from the far end of the station came an old engine pulling three wooden carriages. It heaved and squealed and soured the air with the smell of oil. From the engine window the begrimed and toothy face of the driver grinned out at us as he performed his miracle and brought the train to a stop. ‘He looks a hundred and ninety,’ muttered the handbag lady, raising her belongings chest-high and sweeping forward for her seat. I moved out from the pillar and was on the step into the carriage when I saw him, a flash of white hair, a tall figure with the underarm bundle of his things as he came out of the waiting room and climbed onto the train. He was there. My father. He was so intent on not missing the connection that he didn’t look once to his right or left. He got on the train, moved into the first carriage and sat down. A moment later and we were rattling in a new rhythm into the west.
4
My father was on the train; I stood in the corridor between cars and felt the slopping of an oily sickness in the barrel of my stomach. My feet were rising and falling softly. I couldn’t think, or couldn’t think just one thing at a time, rushing instead through the myriad runaway thoughts of panic. What was I going to do? What would he do, what would he say? Would I go up to him once we arrived? Would he send me straight back? And what was he thinking now, sitting not forty steps in front of me in a train travelling the full width of the island from where he imagined he had left alone his only child in a house with his mother’s ghost? I slid down against the door until I was sitting. Was he not thinking back at all? Had he already crossed over, left all thoughts of that other life and now sat anticipating only the week he had given himself to cover the canvases in the images of the west? I didn’t know, but for two hours sat there on the floor of the train and let the tides of doubt and nausea wash first one way and then the other across my insides until the engine whistled when I looked up and at last we had come to Clare.
The station was small. A train arrived there only once a week, clanking nervously in next to the rings and pens of the cattle mart. The passengers got off with some relief, hastening away to cars or buses and the bustle of the country town down the road. From the rear of the train I watched my father stepping down. He crossed the small platform in the gusting of a summer breeze, a lift to the air that made him pause and steady his canvases, before heading away along the back road behind the town. I waited three minutes and then followed him. He seemed to know exactly where he was going and marched away with that same certain purposefulness that had carried him in and out of the several crises of his life.
The road ran along by a row of houses and then past a high wall that offered no shelter and caused me to let a half-mile open up between us. He was the flicker of white hair in the distance, a ruffle of coat tail. The afternoon was quick and breezy, clouds flew past, the very air was different. We were still miles from the sea but already I could feel it, out there, somewhere ahead of us, the ocean I had never seen. From time to time my father put out his thumb to the cars going past, but none took the chance of stopping for him and he never broke the steady beat of his stride to look out at them in hope. He walked out of Ennis, and I followed. He walked on the side of the road that went northwards to the sea, moving always a bend or so ahead of me until I realised he was not going to get lifts and could let him pull away by as much as a mile as long as I made it up b
efore the next town. Throughout that afternoon then, we paced toward the coast. He stopped once. At a low garden wall where the bushes grew at frantic angles inland away from the burning of winter storms he took off his boots and rubbed the soles of his feet. Little bits of cardboard stuffing fell out on the ground, and he tore and shaped a new insole from more he carried in his sack and then walked on. I gained ground on him then, stopped at the same place and ate the first three biscuits of a pack I had bought at a shop along the road. It was on a rise looking west, and only as I sat there gazing down the road at the thin figure of my father moving away did I realise that on the rim of the horizon, there beyond a little curve of grass dotted with white caravans, was the sea.
It was another two hours before we had reached it. By then the afternoon sky had surrendered to the evening clouds, the wind was blustering, cracking the sheets on washing lines behind the caravans. The sea was in the wind, my sweat tasted salt. As I walked my eyes kept leaving my father and swimming out into the waves and the islands in the distance. I like to think there was something already drawing me then, something that was nothing to do with him, but a feeling the hours of walking, the sea air and sounds themselves had already instilled in me, touching me with a sense of the freshening wildness of those western places that was not to leave me for the rest of my life. I like to think I loved it as soon as I saw it, that I knew the end of our journey was in sight the moment I looked up from that rise in the road. Whatever the case, when my father stepped in over two lines of barbed wire and made his way down to a small strand in the dimming evening, I came carefully behind and did the same, sneaking down across the tufted grass of the sandhills.
By the time I had come to the edge my father was already naked. And even in the moments I watched him walking that high thin walk of his into the thunderous crashing of the first waves, taking them across his midriff in white embraces of chill spray, yelling out in what might have been elation or anger and shaking his hair, I was already stripping and running down, screaming and shouting, leaping the waves to save him from drowning himself in the sea.
5
My father was neither happy nor angry to see me. At least not in any way I can describe. Later I told myself he may have been both, for although a thin man he was capable of the broadest range of emotions. Over the roaring of the waves and his own shouting he didn’t hear me calling, and turned as I reached him only to stagger sideways into the foam, both of us going down into the broken surge of the chest-high waters with the same gasp in our mouths and amazement in our eyes. We came up spitting. As we did, grimacing the water out of our eyes, the tide sucked at my legs, pulling with such swift undertow that I was lifted off the sand and swept at once ten feet from him out to sea. I kicked and thrashed, remembering as a second wave lowered itself into my screams that I couldn’t quite swim. I was thirty feet from him in an instant, sailing and sinking away on the amazement of the swift sea, my foot and ankle poking up ridiculously into the sky, falling back, plunging down like some tremendous anchor until the water ran across the bridge of my nose and I breathed horror through my screaming eyes. My father appeared and disappeared in the scene. I saw him. He saw me, or the naked white body of what he took at first to be certainly my ghost. At first I think he imagined that as such I didn’t need rescuing, I needed wrestling. He put his hands together and dove like a prayer. He vanished and I went under. The world bubbled out of me. I felt hands grappling onto me and my body glistening and slipping through them. He couldn’t hold me, my legs were up, my head was down. The sky rolled round and round in my eyes in the last gasp moments of my life, and then I sank a final time, plumeting through the swirling foam down, down beyond the frantic waters to the still clear cold sea’s floor, where at last my father’s fingers found my hair and jerked me up.
I burst into daylight, lifted, wild-eyed into the air and spewing the sea back into itself. We were far out in the tide now, ebbing away so that for the first time I saw the marvel of the little strand, how perfectly cupped and secluded it was back there across the combs of the breakers, how tiny and sad the little tossed bundles of our separate clothes. My father’s arms were about me. I kicked my legs and they flopped uselessly, making a small splashing that the waves carried away. I think I shouted or screamed, gulping more water, gasping and sucking at the air for it to fill me, falling out of my father’s arms once more, going down, coming up, thrashing and flailing until a hand crashed into my jaw and for just a moment the sea stopped. Silver stars flew up out of the water, sound was switched off, and then my chin was cupped in the great vice of my father’s hand as he swam dragging me out. When he was within his depth he stood and carried me, our two naked figures emerging into the suddenly chill air with the sea running from both of us. On the sand he laid me down. I was still coughing and spluttering, my eyes rolling, when he stood the full width of the sky over me and looking down said:
‘Well, God wants you to live, Nicholas.’
6
It was the beginning of a week of surprises. If I had surprised my father in suddenly appearing naked alongside him in mid-tide when he expected me to be on the other side of the country, that was nothing compared to what lay ahead in that week in the west of Clare. It began quietly. My father, it seemed, had had no intention of drowning himself. It had instead been a kind of western baptism, a dousing in renewal.
At first I hardly noticed that he was a different man, that he was released now from the prisons of his life into doing what he sometimes believed without doubt was the Will of God. He dried me with his shirt until the chattering of my teeth stopped and I could put on my clothes and tell how I had followed him. He looked down into the sand and laughed. Then he got up and wandered off, leaving me sitting by the canvases and bags, hugging my knees and staring out at the extraordinary, seductive power of the crashing ocean. How could the fierce collapse of its thunderous waves, time after time on the dark-sand shore seem so full of softness and ease? How could such force seem so peaceful? The very waters that had frightened the life all but out of me were in the slowly fading evening like the invitations of dreams. I might have walked down into them, so fabulous and wild did they seem, but for the sounds of my father’s footsteps as he came back, armed with rubbish and sticks for the small and brief fire he lit in the shelter of the dunes. It was our first evening’s camp. We ate biscuits and dry bread and cheese. My father had milk he shared. We grew hungry and cold again, of course, but to me at least it didn’t matter. Wrapped in every piece of clothing I had brought, I huddled down in the hollow of the dune. It was a boy’s dream, a night under the summer stars with his father, within the ever-falling sighing of the night sea and the marvelous knowledge that life was real and that God didn’t want me to the just yet.
The following morning I woke at five and found my father gone. The tide had come in and the waves grown louder. Gulls were screaming in the blue sky, and the sea wind blew in the cove with a soft whispering emptiness, running round the sandhills and out again, smoothing out footprints until the morning strand looked again like the first place in the world. I got up quickly. My father’s bags were still where he had left them, and imagining that somehow in nightmare we had changed places and he was the one now being swept out to sea, I hurried to the high tideline, peering out into the waves. For a while I thought he was certainly drowned. I paced up and down along the wet sand, sinking and staring outwards, shouting out his name as the water rushed in joyously across my shoes and the sound of my voice was made small by the sea. Where was he? Was he drowned? Was that dark half-shape in the distant waves his body, that flash of white his head? I squinted and stared, was sure it was, was certain it wasn’t, and might have stripped again and dove in tempting God to save me once more had it not been for the chance flight of a low gull catching my eye and turning me round to see where, there, forty feet above the dunes in the sloping grass, my father had set up his folding easel and was busily painting.
I sank onto the sand. He must have se
en me, must have heard me calling, I thought. Why hadn’t he let me know? For five minutes I sat there on the wet sand. No wave of his hand, no call, no acknowledgement of any kind, just his long figure stooped crazily to the canvas and his hand moving with the brush in quick, sudden movements. I went back up to the camp and lay down. It was five o’clock in the morning, my feet were wet, my eyes stung and I had just learned the first lesson of that week’s education in art: once you begin, nothing else matters, not love, not grief, not anything.
When my father painted, the world beyond his view vanished into nothing. Day after day, wherever we were all along that beautiful coastline, he established the same pattern, rising while I slept, setting up his canvas in view of the sea, painting for four hours in mixed tones of yellow and red and blue and green, turbulent images of spilled colour that on the third day I realised in a sudden flash were in fact nothing more than the sea itself. Everything he painted was the sea; but it was never blue or green. The sky was never the soft and limpid overhanging I saw when I looked west. For him, in his paintings, sea and sky were the expressions of something else, they were the constant and yet ever-changing monologue of God Himself, the swirling language of creation, the closest thing to the beginning of life itself. He painted for four hours and came back to where I was waking, his face drawn and exhausted, the crazy long hairs of his eyebrows flying out at the edges like wings and his eyes puffy and small and streaming tears from the wind. He lay down when I got up. He gave me money to walk to the shops to buy the day’s food, and when I was gone he slept. Later, by midday, he was awake again. And if the field we were in was close enough, he stripped and went down to swim, taking me with him sometimes to teach me how to breathe in water. The days were full of uncertain weather. Rain kept threatening but never falling, holding off in huge pale continents of cloud, slow-moving shapes that above my lying-down head joined one onto the next, sliding together all afternoon until the sky itself was one immensity of whiteness and the fragments of blue were tiny gaps unreachable and high as heaven. After bread and biscuits, or cheese, or sometimes ham, and the shared pint of milk, if we were not moving on, he went back to work, starting the day’s second painting, never touching the morning canvas until the following dawn, by which time, if the wind had been blowing, myriad grains of sand would have found their way onto the paint and the brush would work them deeper into the picture’s texture.
Four Letters of Love Page 10