A Small Part of Me

by Noelle Harrison

  ‘Mammy! Mammy!’

  She drops down onto the sand next to a pile of wood, and it’s like she can’t breathe. She looks strange, white, and Cian thinks maybe she’s dying.

  This is an emergency but he doesn’t have a phone, and maybe in America you don’t dial 999. He looks around him. He could go back to that house, but the woman is a witch and maybe she made Mammy sick in the first place. Then he sees a big jeep parked right by the side of the beach, and there’s a man in it, and he’s looking at him. So Cian jumps up and down, and waves his hands.

  ‘Help! Help!’ he shouts.

  The man gets out of the jeep and stares at him.

  ‘Help,’ Cian yells, so the man starts to run across the sand towards him. He runs like a dog.

  Now the man has reached him. He’s very tall. Cian looks up at him and the sun is in his eyes so he can’t see his face.

  ‘My Mammy is dying,’ he sobs.

  The man turns and looks at Mammy. She’s standing up now and holding onto the pile of wood.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asks the man.

  ‘Yes,’ she gasps, but then she falls down.

  She’s dead.

  Cian screams, a short, sharp peal of fear. The man bends over Mammy. ‘It’s okay,’ he says, ‘she’s just fainted.’

  ‘Is she dead?’ His voice wobbles.

  ‘No, she’ll be fine. Let’s just sit her up.’

  He puts Mammy up against the wood and fans her face with his hat. Cian can see that he has very big hands. Mammy begins to wake up and she whispers, ‘Cian.’ He goes over to her and holds her hand. The man squats beside them and Cian can see his face now.

  He has orange eyes, like a coyote.

  GRETA

  I woke early today – it was just after dawn. I got dressed and went down to the river. I crossed the bridge and took big, long steps down the length of the lawn. At the tip of the garden, I stopped to look at minnows in the stream, see them rush out into the estuary. I could hear a horse neigh in the distance and the birds all around me, competing. I felt part of it all then. It was as if I could look through the mirror that is this world.

  How can I explain it? It was like nature was reflecting back to me the beginning and the end of it all in one moment, and if I could see through this reflection, like Alice going through the looking glass, I could be in another world, with my baby. I could go backwards and forwards. And this pleased me. And if it hadn’t been for Christina, I would have got into the river, in the deep part, and pushed my head right under and gone on through to Matthew, but instead I held onto this world. I felt lighter then, quite elated, and I listened to the cotton reel song in my head.

  When the land felt a little warmer under my feet I decided to go and visit my tree because I haven’t been there in a long time. So I walked through the stream and crawled under the barbed wire fence into the field, cutting across the high grass and ignoring the path.

  My tree was there for me. Fuller than before, its dark green shadow spreading, blocking out the sunlight and billowing all around me.

  Father… I tried to compose a prayer but nothing came. All those words – forgive me, bless me, sin, mercy, love – they all meant nothing to me.

  And then I heard a voice.

  Greta.

  My name sounded like rain falling on a tin roof.

  It was Angeline. She came to stand beside me, dressed still in her nightdress, in Wellingtons and with an old cardigan about her shoulders.

  She said to me, What would you like to do this very moment?

  And I replied, Dance. I would like to dance.

  And she smiled, skinny black plaits framing her olive-ripe face.

  Let’s do that then.

  I hesitated but she took my hand and began to spin me. We were on high ground, at the top of the woods, under my ancient lime tree. I could smell bluebells, a carpet of them at my feet. She spun me and we looked into each others’ eyes. She had me fixed. And in a moment we weren’t in Ireland any more but somewhere hot and Mediterranean, somewhere ancient. The trees around us were columns of marble, and the gentle earth was silvery sand.

  She took her clothes off then. It seemed right. So I undressed as well.

  I took my shoes off first and rolled down my tights, peeling them away like a chrysalis. Then I unbuttoned my blouse and slid out of my skirt. I took everything off, even my underwear.

  She was laughing, dancing in the sunlight. I lost all sense of myself. How could I be Greta? The girl who undressed in the dark so that her husband didn’t see her naked? How could I be her?

  Angeline was smiling, inviting me to laugh. Why shouldn’t I?

  I dived into the breeze, screaming as I did so. I swung my arms from side to side like a lunatic contemporary dancer. I kicked my legs, my feet at angles, awkward and graceful all at once. Then I felt myself rise, higher and higher, a mere speck, a particle fluttering this way and that, held tight by the world and then released.

  I was laughing so much that I was crying. Angeline became serious then and stopped dancing. She came and put her arms around me. It hurts so much, I wept. Shush, shush, she whispered, stroking my hair. We sat beneath my tree, our skin touching. She was smooth, and brown, and warm.

  I dreamed.

  That everything was all right. And in the light I was dancing with my children, both of them. I had never been so close to the other world.

  Suddenly a rush of cold air hit me, my eyes opened and I was wrenched from the ground.

  Hard hands bit into my flesh and a blanket was thrown over my head. Dark, deep black and down, down I went. I started screaming and I grasped the grass, wishing I could go back in time. I kicked and I flailed.

  I heard my husband’s voice. She’s hysterical, quick, get her to the house.

  And then Angeline – I’ll run ahead and call the doctor.

  When they took the blanket off I was at home, with a sheet covering my body. They had brought me into the front room and forced me to sit on the sofa. I saw Tomás there, and the gardener, Jim, and Angeline in a long green dress, with her head on one side. Tomás was shaking me, saying Greta, Greta.

  But now I was mute. I stared at Angeline. There were little red circles printed on her dress. I looked up into her black eyes. I felt dead.

  Tomás, she was saying, she needs help.

  Had she tried to trap me? Or did she share the ecstasy when we danced? Why was she lying? Or did I imagine it all - her dancing, naked in the woods with me? Was it all a figment of my imagination?

  At least she’s stopped screaming now, Tomás was saying. Jim was looking at me, and his eyes were wet.

  Poor wee thing, he was saying, she looks half dead, God bless her.

  Doctor Marsh arrived. He looked sternly at me through his big thick spectacles and put me out. But just before, as he was leaning over me, I caught Angeline’s eye.

  And I fixed her.

  And in a moment I knew what she was doing and why.

  PACIFIC

  LUKE

  Luke comes down from the mountain on Sunday.

  And he knows what he has to do.

  He heads back into town and stops at the first store he comes to. He buys a large regular coffee and a muffin, then sits in his truck with the window wound down, staring up at the North Cascades and thinking about his descent. The coffee warms his fingertips, but it doesn’t taste so good. It tastes metallic. After a week on his own, away from people, he feels assaulted by sensations. The scent of the coffee is different from the stuff he brewed up on the mountain, and the cologne of the sales clerk nearly knocked him down. Everything stinks down here.

  And the noise. He isn’t even on a main road, but the sound of the cars on the hard tarmac hurts him. Everything seems brittle and harsh. Having been among trees, he feels exposed and blinded. It’s like he has woken from a long dream, yet this reality is even more surreal.

  He spends nearly all his time on the road, with strangers coming in and out of his life every day. The
se sorts of things never bothered him normally.

  But then, that was before he ended up spending the week on his own.

  He hadn’t planned it that way. He was supposed to take Sam with him, but at the last minute Teri had said that their son was sick. He called round to see Sam then, though he was only allowed in for five minutes. The poor kid looked green. He was so disappointed. Luke had promised him that they would go later on in the summer if he could get more time off work. But he had seen the look on Teri’s face – fat chance, it said. He wouldn’t be surprised if she’d fed the kid rotten food just so that he’d get sick and couldn’t go. He didn’t put it past her. That was how bad she could be.

  He had gone camping all the same. He went to the campground at Colonial Creek, where they had planned to go. He had spent a couple of days there, hiking along the Thunder Creek Trail. He had enjoyed the walking, but going back to the campsite at night was hard. There were too many families around, and he felt out of place. So he took off on his own. He followed the rules, getting a backcountry permit first, and then leaving his truck behind, he set off. He had a map, enough food and no real purpose. He just wanted to get away from everyone.

  It was all about water up there in the Cascades. Your vision was constantly pulled skyward up to the snowy peaks and the hundreds of glaciers. He liked this icy landscape and longed to go right to the top. Of course, he didn’t have the right equipment; it would be a fool’s venture. But the jagged peaks, the ridges and slopes mesmerised him. This really was the wilderness, and it made him aware of his hunger. Without everyday distractions, he began to feel that something was missing in his life, and he had to find it.

  The more time he spent with his son, the more it reminded him of how he had been when he was a kid. If he could go back to himself he’d say to that little Luke, Well, what do you think of this, you’re living in America and you’re driving a bus every day, collecting people at the airport and driving all the way up the Washington state coast, you nearly make it back into Canada, but then just a few miles from the border, what do you do? You turn around and come all the way back down the interstate. So you taunt yourself every day, up and down, up and down. And all the people see is a guy who drives a bus, nice and friendly. Who cares, really? As long as he doesn’t get stuck in traffic and as long as he drives safe and shuts up with that stupid commentary the company makes him do.

  Little Luke would be real surprised. And he might say, But why? Why don’t you just go home?

  Before the holiday, Sam and Luke had read about grey wolves returning to the North Cascades, but even though tracks had been found, no one had seen one for over ten years. Luke had promised Sam that they would go looking for wolves. And then, of course, there was Big Foot. They had found a website all about the hairy monster, with pictures and sightings and loads of detail, and Sam had been convinced that they would find him. It delighted Luke to see his child so fearless.

  The first few days he was on his own, he felt an appetite that couldn’t be sated, a yearning for something which nothing could distract him from. He went skinny dipping in a freezing glacier pool, walked until even his strong legs ached and stayed up nearly the whole night smoking joints and staring at the star-puckered sky, imagining he could hear one of those lost wolves howl. By the end of the week he came to understand that what he craved was a calling, to find his own path.

  He knew then that he would have to go back. He knew this with the same certainty that he would wake the next day breathing, and the cycle of life would continue around him.

  Luke finishes his coffee, throwing the empty cup into the back of his truck. He checks his map, tracing his finger along the knobbly coast until he finds La Conner. All he has to do is follow the road back into Burlington, then cross over the interstate.

  The sun bounces off the windscreen as he pulls his baseball cap low and puts on his shades. He starts up and pulls out. He grips his fingers around the steering wheel and glances down at his hands. He has big hands. Too soft, he thinks with disgust, I have city hands. His week in the mountains is just a veneer over the life he has chosen and the world he’s denied.

  He leans over and turns on the stereo.

  Cold, cold water surrounds me now…

  He loves this song. He picked up the album in the Experimental Music Project in Seattle. Damien Rice, an Irish guy. He had never heard of him before but he liked the case, and then he had listened to it on headphones in the store. Luke couldn’t put it into words, but these songs just got to him.

  And all I’ve got is your hand…

  He remembers that day. He had taken Sam to the EMP for brunch and then they had hung around in the store for ages looking and listening to music. There was a whole kids section with all sorts of musical instruments. He had bought Sam a little drum. Teri had almost hurled it back at him at the door. Not in my house, no sir, I don’t want that racket, she had said. Sam had spoken up quickly, saying, It’s okay, Dad, you look after it for me. We’ll bring it camping.

  This music reminded him of the pain of that day – being alone with his small son and wishing that he had a family to be part of. It was just the two of them, and it was so lonely. When he had picked up the Damien Rice CD and played it, he loved the way it was all mixed up. There were angry songs, grand songs with an orchestra and soulful guitar pieces. But always the words, this man’s voice transported him far away from his confined life. The lyrics filled his head with stories, and pictures, lots of pictures. And then there was this girl’s voice – it wove in and out of the music and seduced him. It made him think of another type of woman, all soft and misty, with no hard edges like Teri.

  He turns the music up as he goes onto the interstate and heads towards Mt Vernon. He’s not ready for La Conner yet.

  The sky is big and the land sweeps away around him, flat and cultivated. The odd barn springs up, painted merry red, with signs for strawberries and huckleberries outside. He keeps on going.

  Cold, cold water surrounds me now

  And all I’ve got is your hand

  Lord, can you hear me now?

  Lord, can you hear me now?

  Lord, can you hear me now?

  Or am I lost?

  That’s how he had felt when he had been with Teri. Things weren’t much better now, but at least he was surviving and he was doing something about it.

  He had felt completely adrift during the last five years with Teri – half of their marriage. Each time he thought she might be reaching out to him, she was actually pushing him away. And then he got colder and colder. She had no idea who he really was. She didn’t want to know about his family or where he was from. She just wanted to be with someone as fucked up as she was so that there was someone else to blame, someone other than herself.

  Where the hell had she come from? All her anger.

  He had to know. He hated it that his boy was with her now, that she had control over his son’s life. He hated it, but he was powerless. There was nothing he could do about it.

  GRETA

  When Greta wakes she is still in the dream.

  She’s back inside, looking out a window. It’s a view she’ll never forget – shapes of roofs, all piled on top of each other, different angles and tones of grey, all banging together. There’s moss on the slates and there are large metal pipes crawling all over them, like sinister snakes. To her right is one large glass roof on top of a building with tiny little windows across, and behind that is the incinerator tower. All these buildings block out the light.

  She is standing in the stairwell and has to go up.

  The smell of the place is in her nostrils – a heavy odour of greasy food wafting up from the ground floor, turning her stomach as she places her foot on the linoleum stairs as she slowly sidles up, her hand touching the two-tone walls.

  She doesn’t want to go up.

  The door. It’s huge, a grand entrance, with an eastern arch above it. It’s painted orange, which seems sickly and cruel to her eyes. She goes
in and can hear it lock behind her.

  From this side out she can imagine how she looks.

  If you were outside and walking along the road by the pretty green fields or driving into town to do a spot of shopping, your eyes would pull you towards this magnificent building. How could you ignore it? A huge grey stone edifice, solid down to its core, it’s the essence of a fortress – dozens of tall chimneys and narrow slits of windows. It’s impregnable.

  Who was it built to protect? Those inside, or those out here?

  If you look carefully from the road you might see Greta waving to you. Look, she’s right at the top, standing in that little window, sixth in from the left. She’s in a long white nightie.

  They won’t let her get dressed.

  Her hair is dark and lank because they won’t let her wash it and her face is as white as a cloud because she hasn’t been outside in a long time, and her eyes are big opaque moons because of the drugs. You’ll probably want to look away.

  But she is mouthing something to you. What is she saying?

  LUKE

  He pulls into the car park of the Cottontree Inn, his daily pit stop with the shuttle bus. A desire to be somewhere familiar brought him here. Inside the bar is cool, dark and deserted.

  ‘Hi, Luke.’ It’s Julie. ‘What you doing here? Thought you were off this week?’

  ‘I am. I was in the neighbourhood, so I thought I may as well stop by and have a coffee in peace without having to hop on the bus.’

  ‘I hear ya,’ she says.

  He sits drinking for a while and then pulls a thin book out of his back pocket.

  The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.

  Luke pauses and thinks about this. He reads the cover again, To Build Fire, by Jack London. It’s his second time reading the book. He discovered Jack London when he read Call of the Wild to Sam last year and then they moved on to White Fang. Both father and son adored the stories of the dog turned wolf and wolf turned tame, the harshness of the landscape and the adventures of men and animals in this place of extremity. Both those books had had happy endings, but this story is different. It’s about failure, a man who isn’t up to the challenge. It’s slow and relentless and cruel. The story fascinates Luke.