OUT OF THE BLUE a gripping novel of love lost and found

by GRETTA MULROONEY

  She’d looked at him then, wondering how much he knew, what he might have told Nanna in the letters they exchanged but he had busied himself with the washing-up.

  She lowers her shoulders beneath the hot water. Sheer bliss. When she uses the soap, it creates a riot of soft lather. The day’s activity had driven away thoughts, but the usual regrets and anxieties surface as soon as light starts draining from the sky and evening steals in. She has read that babies and old people often grow restless and disturbed as dusk approaches. Douglas has told her that there is a name for it in older people with memory problems — sundowner syndrome. It is the time when all the frettings of life’s ragged edges encroach, the shadows of loss and longings, the whisper of things left undone. In his surgery, he briefs worried relatives who describe their elderly parents pacing the house, inconsolable, twisting their hands with worry, then passes them to the specialist nurse in the memory clinic. It seems to Liv that they suffer from a surfeit of memory rather than a lack of it, that they know only too well how the demons of the dark have their snares coiled at the ready.

  This is the time of day when she recalls the disastrous milestones of her marriage such as the January evening Douglas phoned from the police station to tell her that he’d crashed the car. She was already worried at his lateness, glancing at the clock, getting up from watching the TV to peer through the curtains at the fierce, icy night. The weather forecast had advised motorists to stay off the roads unless their journey was absolutely necessary. Pride and Prejudice was on, but she couldn’t concentrate on Olivier’s Mr Darcy and when the phone rang, she knew that it would be bad news. Douglas had sounded tinny, thin voiced. She felt as frozen as the glacial air outside as he told her he’d been breathalysed and photographed. A police car had dropped him home and he had stumbled through the door, glazed still with drink, a clotted cut over his right eye and blood on his shirt collar. Bathing the eye with warm water and antiseptic, she had turned her face from his fume-laden breath. He was trembling, his skin warm and yeasty. There was mud on his trousers and coat sleeves and the hem of his coat was ripped. He looked and smelled like one of the street people who hung around outside the tube, mumbling their pleas for money. She gathered that he had driven into someone; both cars had been written off but miraculously, the other driver had also sustained only cuts. ‘He must’ve been over the speed limit too, don’t see why I get to take the rap,’ Douglas had grumbled. Patting his brow with cotton wool, she had wanted to shake him, to hit him and return the violence he was visiting on her, on their lives.

  ‘This can’t go on, I’m not going to be your nurse when your liver packs in,’ she’d told him the next morning, her voice snaked with bitterness.

  But of course it had gone on, the dreary litany of ‘just another glass, I can give up tomorrow if I want, it’s just a question of determination’; the weekend health farm bookings for detox; the purchase of cases of spring water and mounds of grapefruit and oranges; the steady hum of the fruit juicer; the diets involving raw vegetables and pineapple; the use of medications that induced vomiting; the days when he looked paler, more frail than some of the patients who crossed his waiting-room. She had witnessed the good intentions, set up like the pins in the bowling alley, ready to be knocked down by the next seductive, brimming glass.

  She wrings out the hot flannel and drapes it over her face, hiding from the demons under the steaming veil. She dozes briefly, while the radio drones and the fire sparks and murmurs.

  Her phone rings and she starts, slopping water over the side of the tub. She switches the radio off with a dripping hand and reaches for it.

  ‘You get a signal OK then, down in the glen — or is it on or up in the glen?’ Douglas says after a pause. He is speaking slowly and carefully. Familiar fingers pinch at her heart.

  ‘Yes, no problem with a signal. How are you?’

  ‘Oh . . . OK. Going to have something to eat in a min. I miss you.’

  ‘I miss you too,’ she says, a half-truth. ‘I’ve been really busy, cleaning mainly. I was just having a bath.’

  ‘How d’you do that?’

  ‘With a tin tub and a lot of difficulty. Four star it isn’t.’

  ‘Well, you wanted to go.’

  ‘Yes, I did. I wasn’t complaining.’ She stares at her white legs beneath the water.

  ‘You settled in, then?’

  ‘I’ve made a start. Everything takes a long time; fetching and boiling water, cooking over the fire. It slows you down. It’s good.’

  ‘Sounds amazing . . . oops, sorry, phone slipped.’

  ‘It’s early yet for you to be drunk, you must have left the surgery in good time.’

  ‘Hmm, not too busy today, just the average arthritic hip or two.’ He clears his throat. She hears an intake of breath, can picture him trying to focus. ‘Listen, I’ve rung AA, going for my first visit tomorrow night.’ He has put on his wheedling voice.

  ‘That’s good, Douglas, it really is.’

  ‘I’m trying, you know?’ he mumbles.

  ‘I know.’ She stares into the fire, into the tiger flames. He seems a very long way away. She is glad of that. ‘Let me know how it goes, won’t you?’

  There is a fumbling. ‘Sno big deal,’ he says. ‘I just have to get myself there, I can do that. A couple of sessions should see me right, no need for months of torture and self-recrimination. Don’t want to change one habit for another, become one of those teetotal bores.’

  She feels the dragging weight of his excuses like a stone around her neck. ‘Yes, of course. Listen, I’m getting a bit chilly now and you need to eat. I’ll ring you later tomorrow night, see how you’ve got on.’

  ‘OK. See ya later. Love you.’

  There is a crackling as he fades. He’ll have bought a takeaway that he will fiddle with, eating a few forkfuls, spilling drifts of chicken tikka on the table as he misses his mouth. Finally he will give up, shoving the plate away and concentrate on his pack of beer or bottles of wine. She misses him, but in the way you would miss a nagging ache that you’d temporarily quietened with painkillers. No, that isn’t even it; she mourns him, she is quietly grieving for the man she met and married, the man he used to be, the one who treasured her before the pale and amber liquids in the dewy glasses enticed him away and replaced her as the love of his life.

  She shampoos her hair briskly, digging her fingers into her scalp to stop the scalding tears that spring, leaking from the corners of her eyes, and rinses it with clean cold water from a jug. She has dressed and is contemplating the best way to empty the heavy tub when there is a light knock on the back door. A well-built man with eyebrows like wild hedgerows is standing with his hands in his pockets, whistling.

  ‘You’d be Liv Callaghan,’ he says.

  ‘I would, yes.’

  ‘The freckles are the same. I heard you were over.’ He has on a dark suit, a mustard-coloured knitted waistcoat and a trilby. His white hair is luxurious and wavy and somehow familiar. It is in stark contrast to the ragged dark of his eyebrows.

  ‘I think I know you but I’m not sure,’ she confesses.

  He holds out a hand. ‘I’m Owen Farrell, your great-uncle — Bridget’s — your nanna’s little brother. We haven’t met for years. Last time I saw you, you had your leg propped on a chair and you were putting calamine lotion on your hives. The itching was driving you mental, you were twitching like a cat in a bag.’

  She shakes his large hand, the size of a shovel. ‘Come in,’ she says. ‘Are you the man who used to smoke Sweet Afton and are those your books upstairs?’

  ‘Very probably. Bridget looked after me once when my Achilles tendon went on me. I was a runner back then, ran for the county. Anyway, one day the old Achilles went twang and Bridget said I needed feeding up. I’d try and blow the fag smoke out the window above but I’d say a lot sneaked back in.’ He takes his hat off and scratches his head. ‘What books did I leave?’

  ‘Dickens, Tolstoy, George Eliot.’

  �
�They’re the companions to see you through, all right. I used to be able to read for hours but the eyesight’s not so sharp now. The Achilles tendon is in great shape, though.’ He looks around the kitchen. ‘It’s a long time since I was in here. It hasn’t changed a bit. Bridget wasn’t your one for the shock of the new.’

  He sounds like Nanna, quiet voiced. He has the same deep set, dreamy eyes and rangy frame and what she thinks of as a countryman’s walk, slow, from the hip. He picks up a brass bell with a stag’s head handle and rings it.

  ‘She got this in the flea market in Cork. I bought a boomerang the same day but I lost it soon afterwards in the fields beyond the house; it failed to come back. We went for tea and cake afterwards. I ate my first walnut whip, my first walnut too. The cream on my tongue was like velvet but I didn’t care that much for the walnut, it was fusty tasting. It was my twelfth birthday, my first trip to the city. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.’

  ‘She must have been quite a bit older than you?’

  ‘Seventeen years. I was an afterthought, my poor mother thought I was the menopause. When she found out she was pregnant she went to see the priest and he told her I was an extra blessing from God.’ He shakes his head, grimacing. ‘I’m not sure any of the family would have agreed with him. Bridget was more like my mother than my sister. This place is yours now.’ He takes out a tobacco pouch and extracts a thin home-made roll-up. ‘Mind if I light up?’

  ‘No, go ahead. Nanna left me the cottage. It was an unexpected surprise. You don’t mind, do you?’ It suddenly occurs to her that this great-uncle might have come to raise an objection.

  He shakes his head, trimming the end of the cigarette of its ginger tobacco shreds before lighting it. ‘God, no.’ He draws in deeply. ‘Not much of an inheritance though; I’d say it would take a fair bit of work to make it sound. Are you going to keep it?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know yet. I’m still getting used to the idea of it being mine. I’m going to spend a bit of time here, get the feel of the place. It’s so peaceful.’

  ‘You think so?’ He stands with a hand on the mantelshelf, looking into the fire, pushing a crackling log further in with the heel of his boot.

  ‘Yes, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, now. I’d guess that peace is what a person brings to a place as much as anything. Make sure this fire’s damped down before you go out and when you go to bed at night, the draught works well here. D’you know about raking the ashes?’

  ‘No, what’s that?’

  ‘If you want the fire to stay in, not have to light it again the next morning, heap a big pile of ash over some hot turf. It’ll stay in and next morning you can put the bellows in under the ashes and apply gently; abracadabra, you’ll have a flame before long.’

  She listens carefully and to the laughter that touches his voice. It stirs a memory of blue smoke rings drifting through the window. ‘I remember you now,’ she says. ‘You told me that the blue in blue cheese was made by cheese worms and that when the police put you in custody, it meant you had to stand in a bowl of custard.’

  He throws his head back and laughs. ‘What a terrible fellow I was, spinning stories like that to a child.’

  ‘We were sitting at that table, having boiled eggs. Nanna told you off and warned me I was to take no notice of you. Then she threw the window open and ordered you to lean out with your cigarette.’

  ‘She was right to tell you to ignore me.’

  ‘I didn’t eat blue cheese for years because of those worms.’

  ‘I hope you forgive me now for depriving you.’

  ‘I’ll think about it. It was very traumatising, you know.’

  ‘Oh, I can imagine. Now, d’you want a hand emptying this?’ He nudges the tub with his boot.

  ‘Would you mind? I was wondering how to deal with it. I’d planned to drag it outside.’

  ‘No need for that. It’s the least I can do after terrorising you in your early life. Open the door for me.’

  He picks the tub up by the handles, hefts it outside as she pushes the door back and throws the water in a wide arc over the bushes, then puts the tub upside down on the gravel. ‘There, now.’ He gestures at the heavy sky. ‘We had a grand July this year, but August was a washout. They’re threatening a sudden blast of summer now, so you might still get the benefit. The farmers could do with it, certainly.’

  ‘I thought I might swim tomorrow,’ she says.

  He gives her a look. ‘Jaysus,’ he says, ‘you English are half daft. That sea would chill your bones — it’s the Atlantic, remember. Next parish America.’

  She laughs. ‘I’ll give it a go, even so. I used to swim down on the strand when I was little.’

  She can recall exactly the gritty, stinging sand particles in the breeze that always blew inshore, the jellyfish that floated in every July and made her run from the sea, frightened that their pale bodies might touch her, the shock of the cold green water against her goose-pimpled legs.

  ‘Well, it’s your funeral, as the magpie said to the worm as he ate him for breakfast. I’d best be on my way, I’ve a dog who needs his evening walk.’ His cigarette has stuck to his bottom lip and he peels it off. ‘If you want to visit, you’re welcome. I’m just at the westerly edge of Castlegray, the house called Lissan. I could make one of my famous fry-ups.’

  ‘Thanks, I will,’ she says. ‘Oh, before you go, would you take a photo of me, outside? I just wanted to mark this . . . this well, I suppose it’s a kind of homecoming, isn’t it?’

  She fetches her phone and he snaps her quickly by a pot of scarlet geraniums. She likes the way he is business-like, no fuss.

  ‘There,’ he says, handing the phone back. ‘It makes a welcome change from all the sombre photographs of emigrants back down the years; tears and lamentations on the quayside. A great sign of the times, the old country opening up again. Now, I must love you and leave you.’

  ‘Your hat,’ she says, darting in for it.

  He flicks the brim and fits it on his head. ‘I felt for you,’ he says, ‘scratching at your skin. I used to get the hives too, when I was a child, big hot weals that would blister. At night they’d have me demented. I’d be poking them with a stick. My mother would give me sulphur tablets to cool and purify the blood. I still get itchy skin in spring and at the start of winter, I’m a seasonal creature.’

  ‘Me too,’ she says, ‘little runs of itchiness, there one minute, gone the next.’

  ‘We must have fiery blood, you and me.’ He glances at her, smiling.

  ‘Hives are an allergic reaction. You’d be given antihistamines now,’ she tells him.

  He takes a final suck of his cigarette and throws the stub into a bank of ferns. ‘That’s too clinical an explanation, too neat by a mile. I prefer the idea of hot blood. See you then, maybe.’

  ‘Thanks for the help with the tub and the tip about the ashes,’ she calls as he makes his way down the path.

  He raises his hat and waggles it without looking back. On the road at the foot of the glen is a bright blue car. Inside, she can just make out a dog, its nose poking through the open window. It leaps up as it sees him approach, paws pressed to the glass. She watches until he’s vanished from sight, remembering how one autumn, hives had come up on the soles of her feet and she’d walked barefoot on corn stalks after the harvest to find some relief. The sharp blades of the stubble had pierced the blisters and freed bright red ribbons of blood. Nanna had made her soak her feet in cold water in which she dissolved potassium permanganate crystals; her skin was stained a pale purple, the colour of ripe plums, for weeks afterwards.

  She turns back into the cottage. Fiery blood; what does she know of Owen? Something had happened in the family; that was all she could recall. She remembers that summer when her mother had lost the baby who would have been her brother or sister and she was left with her grandmother; Nanna sitting by the fire, legs akimbo, a lamp by her side, reading a letter, whispering that her tyke of a brother had the hea
rt across her and would live to rue the day. ‘He’ll find he’s treading the sorrowful road after what he’s done.’ She had wanted to see the letter, curious to know who had written it and why Owen would find the road sorrowful but her grandmother had thrown it into the hissing fire and poked it sharply down until it was consumed to grey ash.

  In the evening, after she had gone to bed, Liv heard the door closing and watched from the window as her grandmother made her way down to the well in the dusk, her shawl gathered around her shoulders. Bats swung above her head in a criss-cross dance, vague shapes in the half-light and Liv felt anxious at being alone. She got up and quietly followed her grandmother, sensing the tension in her back. Peering from behind the bushes, she had seen Nanna circling the well, round and round in a clockwise direction, her rosary playing through her fingers, whispering her prayers. Suddenly, she missed her parents and darted back to the cottage, running up the stairs and pulling the bedclothes up around her head.

  Once, when she had been constructing a family tree for a school project, she’d asked her father to go through her grandmother’s side. He had counted off the names: Bridget, Dennis, Fergal, and Oona. She had written them in, then asked what about Owen, wasn’t he the youngest? Her father had pulled at his moustache, tested a wobbly chair, saying it needed mending. She had looked at him, puzzled, pen poised. She had asked again; wasn’t Owen the baby? Her father had nodded, saying he’d better see to that chair before someone took a tumble from it. So she had written in the name, Owen, thinking again of the sorrowful road, imagining it as a thorny country path like the boreen that ran from Nanna’s to the Moran’s farm. The boreen was bumpy, bordered with thistles, nettles and tall fat dandelions. When she walked it with her father he slashed the weeds and branches aside with a blackthorn stick, saying sternly, ‘down, down, false pride, discourses die,’ which was a line from a hymn they sometimes sang on Sundays. She pictured Owen becoming tangled in the brambles as night was falling, without a stick to beat them back, wishing that he hadn’t done the thing that made his road sorrowful.