by Neil Jordan
“Her lover pleads with her to come down. But her eyes stay glued to the horizon.”
George reached out his hand. She grasped it, leaned outwards, beyond the parapet. The wind scorched up the tower wall, blew her dress into a frenzy.
“And then she sees it. A sail. Unmistakably black.”
George pulled her towards him and she turned in his arms, her own arms crossing her breast like a bow.
“She can’t help herself.”
And she couldn’t, as the wind surged upwards, blew her hair around her face, turned her dress into a balloon, which she tried to smooth with one hand, the other holding his arm for balance, when she lost hers, swayed backwards and he reached out for her, too late, and they both tumbled into the mad air.
She could see herself falling, floating down like a dandelion pod, her troubled fantasy of tower and maiden unravelling in descent, her dress blown upwards in the wind, then reassuming its more proper configuration as gravity took over her upper body, George clinging to her, crying as he plummeted, the two long syllables that made up her name. She didn’t recognise the name, though, she had become someone else, someone nameless, someone she didn’t know, waiting for the sail, black or was it white, like the white sand rushing towards her, the wind pulling her hair backwards like a bonnet or a scarf.
She bounced like a broken doll, off the beautiful white sand-dune, and the sand hardly harmed her, spread out in a scallop, but George falling next did all of the damage, his knotty weight crushing her beneath him, his elbow shattering four ribs, his knee breaking her pelvis, his face whipping forwards to meet hers in a bloody kiss. They rolled then, raising a plumed feather of sand in the wind, and tumbled to a dead halt in one another’s arms.
18
THERE ARE GRANITE blocks now stacked below the entrance where George let us use him as staircase, and Gregory climbs them into the gloom inside. The odour is the same after decades, though the light is different, wintry, and the temperature is cold. A breeze cuts down from above, and the apertures are barely defined by the dying light outside, almost a match to the darkness within. He climbs the indented steps and by the time he reaches the top, night has almost fallen. An endless stream of white caps dots the horizon and on the distant golf-course the last golfers are hurrying to the Captain’s bar. The sand-dunes below have been shifted by the decades of wind and if I’d fallen now I would have bounced off the hard shale and died anyway. He walks the final steps up to the parapet and stands where we stood before the fall. He looks down at his laced boots and sees the sweep of the wall fall away below them. Then he hears the sound of another’s feet and grips the buttress to steady himself. He hears a match flaring, the scraping of the red head ofif the sandpaper, and turns and sees the face behind the reddened glow inhale, brown eyes, the skin around them wrinkled with the years, small scurfed lips. He recognises the face from its earlier version and says her name. Janie.
“I could see you,” she says, “I could see your car taking the road by the river, so slow that it looked like it was remembering. I come here once or twice a month, look out over the golf-course, over the river to Baltray, and indulge in the same activity. But what is it, Gregory, remembering? Is it revisiting the past in all its remembered detail, or is it trying to find that bit, that pivotal bit, we can’t remember?”
“The latter, I would say.”
“Well, if it’s that, then we use the wrong word for it, don’t we? Trying for that bit we can’t remember is not remembering, it’s more like digging, gouging into the forgotten, asking why it is forgotten. And maybe it’s forgotten because it needs to be, it’s better that way. I like it up here though, like looking at the waves, the golf-course, the river, thinking of the black sail, the white sail, thinking of their fall from here, years ago, they almost died, could have saved us all this bother. And you could have called, Gregory, me of all people. You could have sent a polite note, Mr. Hardy will be at home at the following hours, because, let’s face it, it’s not every day your brother murders your sister, is it?” She stubs out one cigarette, takes out another, holds the golden packet of Sweet Afton towards him. “Do you want one,” and she adds the suffix, “love?”
He takes one, though he doesn’t smoke.
“No,” he says, “it’s not every day your brother murders your sister.”
“I walked him round the gardens,” she says, “with the peelers and the doctor and asked him to give us a hint of where he had put her. And you know what, Gregory, it was the strangest thing. It looked like he was trying to remember too. Not where he’d dumped poor Nina’s body, no—where we played by the river, where we swung on the swing, where we hosed him down when he got stuck in the silt, to remember everything but the bloody act of the day before or was it the day before that. And I’ve been trying to pinpoint the moment after which he never would get better, to remember it, I’ve been walking round here like a ghost revisiting, and I just can’t do it. Was it here, when the two of them fell? Or after it, those weeks in the hospital when he grew like a beanstalk? Or was it after, when he made the break with us, working in Keiling’s fields with the dummies from Portrane? I got the scholarship, remember, and your father did what he could, put me in the Siena Convent with Nina, and George became . . . George . . .
“Or was it later when you both signed up, was it what happened in the Dardanelles? He never spoke about it, neither did you for that matter, how could you, you never came back. But he did, and he was missing a finger. Not the best move, maybe, with the way things were going. They gave him the mother and father of a hiding after they burnt the shellfish factory and he seemed strangely proud to receive it, walked around the townland with his battered face and his missing finger as if they were some kind of commendation from Lord Kitchener himself. But he was still George then, the George we knew, a damaged adult version, maybe, but still the brother I knew. We looked after him then in between his bouts of wandering, wherever, Lee-on-the-Solent, the South China Seas, but he always came back and at some stage, and I can’t remember when, St. Ita’s Portrane became the only possible home from home for him. And by then I couldn’t connect him any more to the brother I had. So, something happened. And I would love, more than the love of anything, more than the love of God, to know what it was. It got worse of course as the years went on, so that by the time she took over the house he was almost a boarder in St. Ita’s, and she took him, an act both noble and foolhardy, and ultimately, suicidal. Do you remember, Gregory, the times that he was right?”
“I do,” says Gregory and shivers. “But is this the place to be having such a conversation?”
“Where else were you thinking?”
“Somewhere,” he says, and cannot help the cliche, “a tad warmer.”
She is silent as he drives past the sand-swept golf-course, watching his profile against the lights of the cottages, against the darkness of the padlocked fairground. She can see the child she remembers there, like the faint imprint of the carvings they left on the chestnut tree. She shivers, as if the memory makes her colder, as he parks beside the rusting, silent cars.
“You remember,” says Janie as they approach the amber window-lights of the old thatched pub, “the night Boxer Kavanagh took on five peelers after closing time?”
“I don’t,” says Gregory.
“He of the seventeen children, by seven different farmer’s wives, of the massive forearms and the breeze-block hands?”
“The life I lived here, Janie, seems like someone else’s.”
The double doors of the pub swing open and they are inside, shivering, banging their hands together for warmth.
“An interlude,” he says.
“Interlude between what and what?” she asks.
“In the theatrical sense,” he says. “Nina would have explained it better. A diversion, from what life was before, what it would be later. What’ll it be, Janie?” he asks.
“Hot whiskey,” she says, so he orders two, one for her, one for himself.
“I was
Irish for seven years,” he says, “and remember it as a diversion from a life that would have otherwise been ordered differently.”
“How differently?” she asks.
“Or a life that would have otherwise been ordered.”
“You seemed ordered enough to me,” she says, slipping the lemon from the drink through her teeth, “but then you always seemed that, ordered to a fault.”
“Then why can I look on it like a dream, a dream of someone else’s life with everything clearer than it should be?”
“If it’s that clear, how come you don’t remember Boxer Kavanagh and the five peelers?”
“Ever literal, Janie,” he says, and she laughs.
“I remember that laugh,” he says, “and it is good to hear it, I remember it as clearly as the gap between your front teeth.”
She closes her mouth self-consciously and the laugh becomes a snigger. “It was always her,” she says, “always her could make me laugh, bend me over double, but the thing is I had to laugh, not because the joke was funny but because a laugh was what she expected. She’d put on that high-toned voice, come out with a quip or a quote and my job, pure and simple in the scheme of things, was to laugh at it.”
“The scheme of things,” says Gregory, “what scheme of things?”
“I was smaller than her, slower than her, more timid than her, much poorer than her, less pretty than her. I was less, little Miss Less, in every possible way. That was the scheme of things, and so I laughed when bidden. But enough about me. Tell me about you, your interlude.”
“I never knew I had a sister, or a half-sister, till I came here.”
“Half-sister.”
“Yes. Two halfs, she said, trying to make a whole.”
“Did you ever make a whole?”
“Yes, for seven years. And you realise in retrospect, the interlude was in fact the play. These bits on either side, the before and after, your life, perhaps, but the interlude was where the drama was and everything else was . . . pale in comparison. I came to this country I never thought I would see, to this house I had never imagined to see, across the kitchen table the sister I never knew I had. And every moment after that, seven years of moments, all charged with the possibility of loss—loss of what you never knew you had, which you felt wasn’t really yours, didn’t deserve to be yours. I was a brother here, had a family for seven years, and when I left that life vanished, and whenever I came back, that life returned. It was only possible here, this townland, the sea, the river. And I got to thinking I had dreamt this life, the sea, the river, I had dreamt her and she had dreamt me.”
“You were her dream of a brother, you mean,” says Janie, smiling knowingly.
“Compliments will get you nowhere,” he says and tries to smile.
“No,” says Janie, way ahead of him, “they never do.”
“You’re laughing at me,” he says and she agrees, “Yes, a little,” and leans over to flick that ash off his cigarette and touches his hand, gently, then strokes his finger, teasingly, and says, “But really, enough about you, about my brother, nothing half about him, what was the point beyond which he lost it, retreated into that place of madness that would allow him to . . .” And she shivers, and sucks on her cigarette.
“I slept beside him till he got too big for the bed, he was the toddler, the little one with the blond hair and the nose that always needed wiping. And the reason you found me on the tower was I was wondering was that the day it all went wrong for him. The day he fell, with Nina. I remember looking down, they seemed to float, like those dandelion seeds we used to blow, float, until they hit the sand, and even when they hit the sand it didn’t seem real, it puffed out around them like dust from a carpet-beater. Was that the day, I often wonder, when he changed from one thing to another? He came out of hospital, remember, six weeks later, and he’d sprouted, grown enormous, we couldn’t call him little any more . . .”
~
She awoke in the hospital with tubes sticking out of her and a dim memory of the feel of sand on her cheek. A face bent towards her in the largest, whitest bonnet she had ever seen. “Little girl,” the voice said, “little girl, don’t fret now, don’t try to talk. You had an accident, you’re in St. Michael’s Drogheda and all shall be well, very well.”
And of course talk was the first option she tried, making acquaintance with the metal braces round her jaw, twisting her body to make further acquaintance with the plaster round her hip and an agonising pain that made the white light burn whiter. The bonneted one smiled, as if pleased to receive such confirmation of her initial advice, then sailed slowly on through the ward on invisible feet. Nina closed her eyes, relaxed back into her multiple supports and tried to dream her way out of pain.
She came to again as another bonneted head, a black one this time, her mother’s, bent towards her. She smelt the odour of formaldehyde and fish-scales and recognised, behind her mother’s bonnet, her father with his greying hair tangled, his cap in his hand, moist eyes reaching out to embrace her till his wife, her mother, motioned him back.
“No, my love, don’t excite her, the nurses said she shouldn’t move.”
“What larks, Nina love,” he said, “what a fall, eh?” He clucked his tongue and tried to smile, but she could see the tears interfering with the reassurance in his eyes. “Georgie,” he said, “is in the boys’ ward, hardly any the worse for wear than you are.”
Behind him, the dark shapes of trees through the oblong hospital windows, the grey-green walls and the shapes of those bonnets moving, like large attendant butterflies. And behind him another figure, motionless, staring blind, dressed in an old fur coat, Wellington boots and a black hat. Hello there, she thought, you again, Hester.
And at night I can see her sleep, rigid in her casts and braces, her head tossing in the millimetres left to it. I can see the flaws that will develop in the adult face, the barely indented cheek, the tiny scar above the left eye, the eye itself quite blind but moving with a slow, lazy turn that would endear her to a public, those flaws that mar the perfection, turn it into what is ordained to be beauty. I had a real face, I was told, beautiful but real, which I always presumed meant not beautiful enough. The mouth was what defined it though, full and downturned, with the promise of laughter at its corners, a laughter deferred. Come Nina, I wanted to say, mind how you go, walk out of here and change what will be your history, choose, don’t enter that turd-ridden megalithic tomb, treasure your virginity, avoid those phosphorous-odoured lights, see your father before he dies, love well but too much, take heed of Rosalind. Don’t take that boat to Liverpool, that train to Brighton, beware those little accidents that will lead you to what you will inevitably become, to me.
But she’s sleeping now and a soft smile plays upon those lips, the smile for Gregory, for George, for Gregor-George. And even if I could disturb her sleep, I wouldn’t.
~
George on the other hand lay sprawled in the boys’ ward, the smell of scale sweat rising from his body, encased in blue striped pyjamas, the sheets twisting round his twisting body. He slept for six solid weeks, by which time she was up and about, casts off, braces almost gone, sitting by his bedside daily, waiting for him to wake. And when he emerged from that slumber, her damaged face was the first one he saw. He smiled as though he’d seen an angel, an angel with metal wires from teeth to earlobe.
“We fell,” he said, “didn’t we?”
“Yes, George,” she answers, “we fell.”
“How far did we fall?”
“Till we hit the sand-dunes, George, and until you hit me.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and reached out to touch her metal mask. “Did I do that?”
“It was my fault, Georgie, all mine. We fell, like Icarus, like Lucifer.”
“No,” he said, “we fell like Adam and Eve.”
“Theirs wasn’t an actual fall, George, it was more like a fall from grace.”
She said this but she could see the theme was going to
stick. Adam and Eve. They alone, among their peers, were of the fallen. They had fallen, moreover, together and ravaged each other’s bodies in the falling. George, whose brief existence had heretofore been lived in the shadow of others, now had his legend, his fall, had tumbled from the Maiden’s Tower with Nina Hardy, had punctured her maiden’s body with his.
19
THE EMBERS ARE dying in the public house and Janie is on her fourth hot whiskey, cloves, sugar and a slice of lemon.
“His voice had dropped by the time he came out, down to something like a furry baritone, he had grown, sprouted, lengthened, broadened, he was too big for the bed, uncomfortable to sleep beside, and his size gave him a strange, misshapen dignity if there can be such a thing. And at school he’d fallen back so far, grown to the size where he could no longer fit in the desk, where Miss Cannon could no longer thump him, preposterous it would have been anyway, his hands could have crushed the ruler.
“I don’t know who decided he shouldn’t return, Da, Ma, or George himself, but he got a job anyway in Keiling’s farm, so walking home from school we’d see him, you remember, moving down the potato drills in a line with the labourers over from Scotland and the patients from Portrane. He’d give the bulk of his wages to Ma for my education and whatever he was let keep for himself he’d spend on clothes to imitate yours and Vaseline to slick his hair back and impress Nina. Yes, yours, don’t tell me you don’t remember, he could never wear them but he tried, did he try. Even down to the hair which he tried to grow like yours but it rose from his head like a brush which he tried to keep down with more Vaseline. So it grew uncomfortable, didn’t it, we can’t really deny it, Gregory. I was the scholarship girl, he was the day-labourer, you and Nina were the ideal that could never be matched. On his days off, hanging round your front gates or outside the shellfish plant, bouncing flat stones across the river, in his best clothes, waiting for a glimpse of Nina. I’d tell him, George, don’t let on to be so eager, but he would never understand, thought urgency and ardour would get him—what, I often wondered, it couldn’t have been romantic affection, even he would have recognised that as ridiculous— no, it felt more like a return, a need to go back to those childhood moments, when the differences between the four of us were or seemed to be, for some few magical years, non-existent.