But in Brasilia a huge loneliness gripped him, a homesickness that almost made him cry. He was going home the whole time, after a day’s fishing, after mending a tractor on the other side of the island, after being with his cousins at Torbeg. He was always coming home.
He counted the coins in his pocket, changed his money, and took a taxi out to the airport. At a desk he asked the price of a ticket to London. He had less than a tenth of what he needed. He didn’t even have the money for the taxi back; he walked a long way and then took the bus. What came to him was the story of the prodigal son; that was what he thought of in the dry silence of the afternoon at the bus stop. The air was full of insects; the sounds of dry insects.
He found a job in an Irish bar and it took him a long month. He ate like a mouse, saved the smallest coins for new meals. He prayed for tips. The owner of the bar was a man who had no idea where Ireland was, but one of the bartenders had an aunt who seemed to be distantly related to someone from Kilkenny. Everyone talked English, and everyone thought Ranald came from Ireland. In the end he told people that he did; it seemed to bring him more in the way of tips.
Then came a Thursday when he could go out to the airport and buy his ticket. It felt as though he had won the lottery. Something sang in the left side of his chest. And then it dawned on him: he had no passport. His passport was in his father’s desk, in the top left-hand corner of the upper shelf. He thought of phoning Angus to ask him to post it, but that was a matter of pride. He didn’t want to ask any favours of Angus. Instead he found the British Embassy and spoke to a man called Peter Constantine who furnished him with the necessary papers after an interminable conversation with the authorities in London. Ranald heard every heartbeat in his chest as the conversation went on in an office beyond the desk; he made out some of the words but not all of them. The following day he picked up papers that had been sent by email from the office in London; Ranald thanked Peter Constantine too profusely and afterwards felt embarrassed. He closed the door of the Embassy behind him with gratitude and a deep breath. He was going home.
There was one person from the island he knew was in London. He phoned Davie Macdonald from a call box and got the fellow’s mobile number, and late that afternoon he tracked him down. They met for a pint and Ranald was welcome to stay over; it was a case of a couch and a spare toothbrush.
They talked about the landing of a famous fish and he drank too much whisky, but he felt London around him like some gigantic beast. He was trapped right in its heart and he slept fitfully, too hot and restless until the morning. At the breakfast table the older man slapped some notes into his hand, told him it was enough for the train as far as Edinburgh. No, no – he would get it back some time; that was what being neighbours was all about.
At the station he got his ticket and by lunchtime he was onto the train. What was that about a Scot loving the last few feet of the King’s Cross platform more than anything else in England? The train curled north: Peterborough, Doncaster, Leeds, Durham, Newcastle, Edinburgh. And the air was fresh when he got out at the platform; the sound of gulls raucous about him in windy blue sky.
He had just enough for the last ticket, but nothing for a meal. He drank all the water he could at the gents, then boarded the train. Three hours and he felt every moment; he never forgot rounding that bend and seeing the sea for the first time. He felt like a prisoner released after twenty years.
Fortunately it was the cousin of Donald Black who was skippering the ferry that evening, and he walked on for free. He had to go up to the wheelhouse for the half-hour, but he said never a word about where he had been.
He stepped ashore and wouldn’t take a lift from Jimmy the Post. He’d tell his own story in his own time; he didn’t need Jimmy’s help with that. And it came to him as he pushed the yards behind him going up the track he had no idea what day or even what month it was, or how long he’d been away. There at the top of the road was Kirsty, a couple of letters to post in her hand, as though she might have been waiting for him all that time. And her mouth was open with a question she never uttered; he didn’t stop but kissed her, and there was something in that kiss that meant more, that wasn’t to be misunderstood.
He went on up to the farmhouse and in at the back door, and he heard the television’s voice in the living room. He went in and thumped down on the other side of the sofa, and Angus half-turned to look at him. Ranald kept his eyes on the screen.
‘Where’ve you been?’ Angus asked.
Ranald thought a moment.
‘Out,’ he said.
The Gift
I know what it was I wanted to tell you about, it was Christmas. I call myself a traveller who never did, but my mother and father were both brought up on the road. It was my mother who wanted to settle, long before I was born. She’d lost my older brother to pneumonia. They’d been out in the west with the horse and cart one October, in a storm that lasted for days. Everything was drenched and frozen in the end and my brother died before they could get help for him. I think that was why they came to Dublin. I think that was it.
Well, I remember one year I was at school – I would have been six at the time. And the teacher was a Miss Munro, she was a spiteful woman. She was no taller than a pencil and the boys trembled in front of her. She should have been out breaking horses, not in a classroom breaking the spirits of children. She knew fine the names they called me and she was deaf to all of them. If she could find a way to punish me she would. I was forever going off into my own world. I’d sit there with my head on my elbow looking out into the school playground. There was one tree there, a cherry, and I loved just looking at its blossom in the spring and listening to the leaves. One morning Miss Munro must have caught me staring away at that tree and she came charging up the row, twisting my ear in her fingers until she’d hauled me onto my feet, shouting over and over –
‘Are you away with the fairies, Mary Riley? Are you away with the fairies?’
It was coming near Christmas and I’d seen my father pacing again at home.
‘The wolf in him wants out,’ my mother whispered to me as she put a button onto a shirt. But there was the ghost of a smile on her mouth as she spoke the words, and I saw her glance at him as she spoke, though he never turned, only kept pacing.
This particular day Miss Munro had shouted at me for my shoes, the state of my shoes. I felt so small and embarrassed there in the class, and I could hear the sniggers around me; I could tell the rest of them relished my suffering. By breaktime my face was smudged with crying and I felt broken in bits. And suddenly my father was there, in the corridor, and I remember he just picked me up in his arms as if I’d been a bale of hay or a young calf. It wasn’t the end of the school day and Miss Munro came charging out of her classroom.
‘Do you people not know what time is?’ she screamed shrilly, and her red mouth seemed the only thing in her small, white face. ‘Do you people have no idea what time is?’
My father laughed. I could feel his laugh as he held me, but it wasn’t a bitter or an angry laugh; it was soft and just edged with a lace of mockery, no more than that.
‘Ah, you know what clocks are, but we know what time is.’
And with that he turned and went, carrying me still in his arms, as though he was bearing me from a burning building. And all the shrieking of Miss Munro at his back was as grass blowing in the wind to him.
And out there was my father’s old van, and I was puzzled, for he never came to collect me from school. I always made the journey myself, even though it was a long walk on a winter morning.
‘Where are we going, Dad?’ I asked him as he put me into the car, and it was warm and I caught the smell of him, from his hair perhaps.
‘We’re going on a journey, Moorie,’ he said softly, and I knew then he was in a really good mood. If he was sad he drank, and then sometimes he wouldn’t speak to my mother or me for days, but just stare from the
second-floor window, away towards the hills, as though he wasn’t there at all. But when he was happy he ruffled my hair and his brown eyes shone like river stones and he called me Moorie.
We’re going on a journey.
And everything was in the back of his van, and my whole heart filled with excitement. I’d been off with him and my mother in the summertime, to camp by rivers and in glens, to listen to traveller stories at night by the fire. But I’d never been away in winter, when we were stuck in the city, in the fog and the freezing rain. Now we were going on a journey.
What I remember is that night. He was looking for somewhere, my father. We were nearly there, wherever there was. And I was in the back, lying among blankets and coats because he was afraid I’d get cold. And I remember looking out and seeing all those stars. There was a jeweller’s in Dublin that had diamonds in the window set on a black velvet cloth. And that was what I thought of now as we bumped and rattled along back roads in search of the place my father wanted to find.
And some of me wanted to be there, to know what the place was, and some of me never wanted to be there at all. I wanted to stay where I was for ever, looking up at the stars as the van lurched and hummed on and on into the dark.
But at last we juddered to a halt and the silence flooded back. I had no idea what time it was and my father set up the simple tent between two trees. There was no sound in all the world and there was a frost; it was as though a giant in one of the stories of Old Ireland had breathed over everything – the trees, the fields, the hills – and turned them to a silver mist.
*
And my father taught me how to make a fire. He taught me that kindling is everything, that it’s the little pieces that matter. The big bits of wood are all very well, they count later on, but there’s no fire to begin with if there’s no kindling. And he said it was just like that with the travellers, that the big people – the doctors and the teachers and the judges – they were all very well, but they would be nowhere without the little people, the ones who pulled the carts and cleared the fields and mended the roads.
My hands were so cold as I found pieces of wood and kindling and brought them to my father. But when I came back the second time he had lit the fire and was blowing on it, blowing so the flames roared, and I thought to myself that he was a kind of dragon, a magical creature that could do anything in the world he wanted.
I crouched beside that fire and stretched out my hands to it. I felt the orange glow warm on my cheeks. And my father told me about how the travellers came to be, all that time ago in Jerusalem when Jesus was alive. For they had come looking for someone who would make the nails for Jesus’ cross, and no one would do such a thing, for he had been full of only goodness and kindness all his days. But the traveller said he would, and he lit his fire and flapped it into life with his apron. And ever since the traveller has been on the move, restless, journeying from place to place, the ghost of the nails he made shadows in every fire he makes. And I looked for the ghosts of the nails but I couldn’t see them.
And I went to bed with the words still circling my head like stars, and I wondered what we were, we travellers; were we good or were we bad? Was I ashamed to be one for the sin of that first traveller, or was I glad that we were different, that we had learned to find our way in the world by different paths, by secret roads? And I dreamed that night that I was lost, and went knocking and knocking on door after door. But no one would tell me and no one would help me, and everyone just sent me on my way once more.
He woke me first thing next morning.
‘Come on, Moorie,’ he said, and I knew this was it, that now at last I was going to find out why he had brought me here.
We walked into the forest, and it was what he always called a foxy wood. It was dark; the trunks were close and branches snapped underfoot. It smelled of owls and moss and green things. But there was a path, a ribbon of a thing that wound its way between stumps and vanished in a pale thread.
‘The travellers have been coming here for a thousand years, Moorie,’ he whispered, and I didn’t know why he whispered, but my heart fluttered like a bird in my chest and I drank in the place with all of my senses.
*
And at last we came to a glade, a round clearing in the woods, and I looked up at the branches and in them were the strangest globes. I thought at first they were hives – that was what came to me to begin with, that they were wild hives of bees. Some of them were only small and others were big as the globe of the world the headmaster had in his room back in Dublin.
‘Mistletoe!’ my father hissed. ‘Mistletoe, Moorie! And it’s been grown here by the travellers, because it has to be grafted!’ And he explained to me about grafting, and about what mistletoe was. And it seemed to me it was magical, this strange thing growing in globes above my head, with its white berry that was like a river pearl, a cloudy white.
All day we picked mistletoe there in the glade. My father climbed the trees and cut little pieces and dropped them. It was my job to run here and there, collecting them from where they fell, and gather them into bundle after bundle after bundle.
And when we left in the end and drove to a nearby town we sold mistletoe at all the houses, pieces for a few pence. It was frosty and our breath fluttered about us like scarves, and my father told me stories and taught me songs. He was so different from the way I knew him at home in the council estate, among the dogs and the rubbish and the drink. Here he was different: he was himself.
That night the rain came and a kind farmer offered us his barn to sleep in. My father wouldn’t have me getting soaked; he had a horror of that after my brother’s death. The barn was warm with a thick smell; we made our beds and listened to the rain on the roof above us. And the rain was like songs too. And in the night I dreamed that this was the place where Jesus had been born. I had come too in order to see this newborn king. But everyone had presents with them, the shepherds and the kings – I was just a traveller and I had nothing. But then I looked at my hand and I saw there was a sprig of mistletoe – the last one that hadn’t been sold – and I went to the manger and held it above the baby’s head and I kissed him.
That’s what I wanted to tell you. The story of the best Christmas I’ve ever known.
The Healing
The old man looked at him wearily in the half-dark of the stone cell. He had been up since five that morning, and the ache in his left hip had not lessened in the least. But still he did not allow himself to sit to pray. Now it was almost ten and he ached to lie down, to stretch out and let sleep carry him away. Had he battled against such things as this for fifty years with such futility?
‘I am asking if I can go to the island.’
The young man was only a shadow in front of him. He stood and did not move, and did not know what it meant to be sore and old. Silence lay between them and as a paw of wind came and caught the tower so it shuddered; they heard the pattering of snowflakes against the glass. The track would be buried by morning, and the last of the wood was still to be brought in.
Only eight were ever chosen each December, and six of those were there year on year: they did not ask if they might have a place. His hip throbbed so he wanted to weep; a dull, deep drumbeat. The candle fluttered and he found himself nodding, though he did not look at the boy.
‘Why do you want to go?’
He tried to keep the question steady and was not sure he had managed. The boy was seventeen; once he too had been seventeen and sure of nothing but the knowledge the sun would rise the next day. He looked through the gloom to find the boy’s face. If there had been no kindness in his question then may there be some in his eyes.
‘My sister.’
Just a whisper, and the young head bowed and shuddered. The boy wept. It took the old man by surprise, caught him almost like that breath of wind and knocked him softly sideways. He did not know what to do or say. He waited and heard his own heart. He
watched and waited.
‘All right,’ he said in the end, quietly, hearing the strangeness of his own words. ‘You may go.’
*
The chapel on the island belonged to St Lucy. It had been hers since the days she lived herself (leastways that was what the farrier would have said, had you disturbed him at his labour on a good day and he had the time to answer). The chapel belonged to St Lucy, and the legend was that she went there herself, however many hundred years back into the darkness of time. A family lived on the island; survived on what little they grew and on the sweet fish from the lake. The youngest girl fell ill with fever (local people still maintained it was at harvest, for the father was gone to help in the mainland fields, though how anyone knew that was a wonder). But word went out of the girl’s fever, that she was sick unto death and nothing more could be done for her. In those days children were like apples from a tree; carry a bunch in your arms and you could be sure one or more would fall. But word went out of the girl’s illness, and perhaps with the father himself as he went to gather the harvest. For that part of Russia was a land of fields, and whether the seas went dry or the wind stopped blowing, the fields must be delivered of their harvest.
So it was Lucy herself heard of the girl’s dying, and came to the village as night was falling. (The farrier would tell you how many generations ago that was, for his family had been there since Eve put them all out of Eden.) But the boatman wouldn’t go near the lake; there was no moon that night and all manner of stories of beasts that lived in the deep. The truth was he probably feared the fever himself, had no wish to bring it back to five sons and a wife.
Winter Tales Page 6