This Eden

by Ed O’Loughlin

  She stood in the door.

  No. My parents.

  Parents?

  My father. He’s very sick.

  He rubbed his face, as if trying to wake it.

  So you have parents now.

  Of course I have parents, I . . .

  She stopped.

  Tell me about them, he said. You know about mine.

  OK . . . My parents are from Dublin. Not from the country, which is where I grew up. They met in London, when he was working as a banker in the City. He made a lot of money. My mother loves thoroughbred horses. They cost a lot of money. So he retired early and they moved to Kildare, where there are lots of horses. But the people in Kildare don’t sell their good horses to blow-ins from Dublin or London, or pay them to train them. So my parents don’t have any horses now, or any money. When I was planning to quit my old life, I gave them my savings to invest for me. They invested them in horses. I suppose they meant well, at the time.

  Behind her, in the boat’s little kitchen, she could hear the kettle she’d lit earlier. It was starting to sing. That again.

  This is just another one of Towse’s tricks, isn’t it?

  If it is, I’m not in on it. I got a message. My father is sick.

  How did they send you a message when you don’t have a phone?

  He wants to believe me, she thought, but even the truth makes me look guilty. The kettle was screaming. She slumped back against the wall.

  I went out for a smoke last night. I stole a cell phone from those refugees. I called a voicemail that I use as a cut-out. My mother had left me messages.

  She wondered how long that kettle could scream before it evaporated all its water, before the bottom turned red, then melted into the propane.

  You could be making all that up, he said.

  That’s right. I could.

  You could be making it up to lure me to Ireland, because that’s where Towse wants me.

  That’s possible. But it isn’t true.

  Or you could be making it up as an excuse to get rid of me.

  If I wanted to ditch you, Michael, I wouldn’t bother with excuses. You’d turn around and I’d be gone.

  He nodded, continued:

  Or the message could be real, but it could be a trap. For one or for both of us.

  The message is for me, Michael, not for you.

  Maybe they think I’d come with you.

  I won’t let you. You’re safer here. But I have to do this. I have to go to Ireland, to find out for certain. He’s my Dad.

  I’m coming with you, Aoife.

  No you’re not. I don’t want you to.

  She wondered why she was lying, to herself and to him. But there was no time for that now. It was a moot question. The blunt fact remained, that there was no point in both of them walking into an ambush, if that’s what it was.

  You can’t come with me, Michael. I have to do this alone. This is where we say goodbye.

  So, like, we’ll always have Paris?

  I’m going home, Michael. I don’t need you anymore. That’s all there is to it. Goodbye.

  He folded his arms.

  I didn’t say I was going to Ireland for you, Aoife. I’m going for Towse.

  Towse?

  He said he needed help with his end-game in Dublin.

  Why the hell would you want to help him, after all he’s done to you?

  Because of last night. Because of Didier, and those refugees.

  What?

  Those gnomes have got me thinking.

  Those words have never been said together before. What the hell do you mean?

  I mean, maybe it’s time I got in a fight.

  Bullshit, thought Aoife. Why can’t he look me in the eye while he says that? Why does he really want to come to Ireland? For his parents? For Alice? But vengeance is violence, and he was not the violent type.

  The kettle was still screaming. She turned on her heel, stopped, turned back to him.

  Come if you want, then, she said. I can’t stop you. But keep me out of Towse’s thing, whatever it is. I don’t want to have anything to do with it. You shouldn’t either. That guy will get you killed.

  Part Six:

  Tír na nÓg

  Cherbourg to Dublin was an eighteen-hour crossing. English Channel, Irish Sea. They paid cash for their tickets, and some extra for a cabin, where, without any discussion, they slept in separate bunks. In the morning they went on deck to watch Ireland on the port side, sliding into the south. It was a blustery day, wind and rain from the west, and hills hardened and softened in the gaps between squalls. Michael had no names to put on anything he saw, so he thought of ones that he already knew: English Bay, Strait of Georgia, Juan de Fuca, Salish Sea. These hills were also livid and green, and the rain here was warm. Snow would be wet, like the snow in Vancouver. It wouldn’t last long.

  Aoife, who had begun to talk again, a little, showed him a lighthouse that rose sheer from the sea. Kish, she told him. This wasn’t Vancouver. Alice had never lived here, and he wasn’t going home.

  Aoife showed him some hills.

  Wicklow, she said. Soon we’ll see Dublin. It’s around that next point.

  Is that where your parents live?

  It’s where they live now.

  Do you want me to go with you?

  She remembered her childhood, cold stares at her friends.

  No.

  She saw his reaction. It’s not like that, she thought. But she couldn’t say it aloud.

  It’s not safe, she told him. I have to go alone. I’ll come and find you later.

  What would I do if I waited for you?

  I don’t know . . . We can find you a bed and breakfast, one of the quiet ones near Connolly Station. You should be safe there. You can go to the museums. Take a bus trip around the city. Do whatever you do on a foreign vacation.

  I’ve never been on a foreign vacation.

  She reached over, squeezed his arm for a moment. But the touch felt insincere to both of them. They had spent nights together, but by daylight they were spies.

  The ship turned west and entered a bay. Strobe lights flashed red on two high brick chimneys. Homely little houses lined the shore. No glass and steel towers, no marshalling yards, no silos or mountains of sulphur, no Vancouver, just the fringes of a town that, to Michael, looked like nothing but fringes. Channel markers, sea walls, a river mouth, cranes. The ferry sidled up to the dock, acres of concrete, where cars and trucks waited for the return sailing. The wind was up, and flurries of drizzle brushed the shine from the water. So this is Dublin, thought Michael. He looked at Aoife, leaning at the rail beside him, watching the ship dock. She had seemed so exotic, when he first met her, yet even she had a family, and a place where she belonged.

  There was a payphone in the ferry terminal, in a corner by itself. It had a slot for coins and another for plastic. Michael stopped in front of it.

  Give me Towse’s number.

  You’re not really going through with this, are you Michael? He’ll only bring you trouble.

  Stop playing games, Aoife. It’s why you brought me here, right?

  No. And you’re the one who’s playing games now. You don’t have to help Towse just to prove a point to me.

  Give me his number, and let’s get this over with.

  Listen: I can’t go with you to meet Towse now. I have to go see my father right away. He’s sick. I could already be too late.

  Then I’ll go without you. I guess that’s part of Towse’s plan too.

  I really doubt that.

  Screw you, Aoife.

  I’ve no right to stop you, Michael. But wait for me, please. I’ll go see my father and then I’ll come and help you.

  What day is it?

  It’s Friday.

  The
n it has to be now.

  Michael had never used a payphone before. He tried the number three times before Aoife, relenting, told him not to put the Dublin 01 area code in front of the number. This time the call went through; it rang out, unanswered.

  There’s no one there, said Aoife. Forget about Towse. Come with me.

  He turned away from her, dialled again. She watched him, helpless.

  I have to go now, Michael. I can’t wait anymore . . . If you won’t come with me, let me give you my parents’ phone number. If you change your mind, you can call me there.

  She wrote the number on a leaflet she took from a stack on the counter – something about a virus, and quarantine, and reporting symptoms.

  I have to go now, she said. I hope that Towse never answers.

  But when she was gone, on the third try, he did.

  After Aoife’s parents had burned through the last of her father’s banking money, and all of Aoife’s savings, and their stud farm in Kildare finally went broke, they moved to a small apartment beside the River Tolka, on what was, for them, the wrong side of Dublin. Aoife made the taxi driver go two hundred yards past the entrance before she got out, then walked back to the pub opposite the apartment. She went in, used the bathroom, came out again, smoked a cigarette in the doorway. It gave her a chance to check out the flats. She could see no sign of danger. The complex had been built in the 1970s, and mature trees filled the gaps between the red-brick units. They were coming into leaf; spring always came earlier in Dublin than it did in Kildare, only forty miles inland.

  It made no sense to her that her parents were here now, in the city. She had stayed with them in their new flat last Christmas, sleeping in the spare room. There was always fake jollity, a feeling of silence interrupted. In the countryside, there had been something to look at outside the window, the sound of horses and tractors, work to be done in the stables. Here, there was the television, which they left on all day, the volume up loud. They had a balcony, a view across the river to the Botanic Gardens, but Aoife knew that her mother rarely looked out.

  She took the lift to the third floor, confronted the door of her parents’ apartment. She had to get ready for what lay beyond it, down the hall, in the larger of the two bedrooms. She pictured a bedside, a nurse, her father’s two sisters, her brother in a chair, reading a book. Maybe there’d be a priest – her father wasn’t religious, and neither were his sisters, but they liked to pretend they came from old money, that they were a family which did things in a certain way. It had hurt them to have to send Aoife to a school that didn’t charge for the privilege. But there had been the cost of running the stables, of all the plans that had never quite come off.

  The plans. She felt like crying. She remembered how, when she was small, her father had decided to lay out a tennis court on the lawn, which was certainly big enough: they basically lived in a field. We’re going to have tennis, she had told the other girls in school. Her dad had driven the posts in, then, distracted by something else, had never marked the lines out, or strung up a net. We’re going to have a tennis court. She’d forgotten about that. But the little girl who hid inside her, under all those years of accretion, still believed that there would be a tennis court, and she would continue to believe it until the man who had mentioned it, all those years ago, finished the job or formally renounced it. He was behind this door, now. He was dying, if not dead.

  Had she made it in time? She put her ear to the door, closed her eyes, listened for clues. Somewhere inside was a murmur of voices. It could be people talking, or it could be the television, in the corner of the living room, her mother’s daytime shows.

  Aoife knocked on the door.

  The voices stopped. Quick footsteps in the hall. Aoife got ready for the worst thing she could think of. Her mother would open the door, tell her that she was too late, that he had died asking for her, and then close the door again, leaving her outside. She knew her mother wouldn’t do that, but she needed to punish herself by experiencing it now. Whatever happened next, when the door opened, she reckoned she’d deserve it.

  The door opened.

  Aoife?

  Her father was dressed for the street, except wearing slippers. He looked perfectly healthy.

  Dad?

  *

  The Cross Guns Bridge, said the bus driver. You get off here.

  His voice was muffled by a medical face mask, though the air outside seemed fine to Michael. He’d seen a lot of those masks since arriving in Dublin. Were Irish people given to hypochondria, or were they deeply withdrawn? All that Michael thought he knew about the Itish was that they liked to drink.

  Michael got off the bus and looked around him. The rain had cleared, a spring sun was shining, but it felt to him like the day should be grey. A busy road, red-brick terraced two-storey houses. A fish and chip shop, closed. A hardware store, open. A sign, painted on a corner, that said Bang Bang. He was only a mile or so from where he had boarded this bus, and already it felt like the city was behind him. Was this how suburbs worked, in Ireland? To him, the houses here looked tired and small. They told him about old people, yellowing doilies and antimacassars, about clocks that ticked slowly, dust and sad memories. Where he came from, they bulldozed old houses to put new things on top of them, to tamp down the ghosts. They exorcised the past with money, which was why they always needed more and more of it. Here, it looked as if at some point they had just given up, stopped, turned to face what they should run from. Maybe they were on to something, after all.

  Michael turned, followed the bus as it drove up the road. Pub on the right, closed. Office building on the left, vacant. And now a narrow canal, running east–west under the road, and a bridge with a green iron balustrade, water foaming through the sluices of a lock. He considered this canal bridge before he crossed it: it was mercifully low, not quite twenty feet wide. Having crossed, he turned left, past a furniture sales room, on to a towpath that led into the west.

  The canal broadened here to form a small basin or harbour, a switching point, from the days when summit canals were the hottest thing in technology. A tall, stone-fronted warehouse, converted into apartments, stood reflected in the water. Beyond it rose a derelict grain elevator, a cluster of grey concrete cylinders. This elevator was small, not like the timber cathedrals of his prairies, but it was still the tallest building in the area. Beyond this, the canal narrowed again, and the towpath climbed to another, higher lock.

  This was definitely the place, just like Towse had described it. Where was Towse?

  Someone had climbed to the top of the old grain elevator and painted the word Thirst there, but it was now partly hidden by a coat of whitewash. Traffic hissed on the bridge like radio static. To his right, a spiked metal fence was woven with nettles and elders and the papery white flowers of bindweed. He thought of the edges of all the small towns that he’d passed through down the years. If this were the prairies, there would also be a railroad, boxcars left standing in switchyards and sidings, frozen in the act of passing through. And there it was – the singing of rails, the sound of a train’s horn, invisible but only yards away. Somewhere close by, just beyond that steel fence with its curtain of bindweed, a railway was hidden inside a deep cutting.

  You could adjust the colour palette, switch out a few details and vary the difficulty setting, but every level of this game was pretty much the same.

  When the train was gone, the towpath returned to the quiet of midday. Except now, having wandered on a few more yards, he could hear voices. Beyond the fence, men were laughing.

  As he watched, the lower section of the fence swivelled outward and upward, like an overgrown cat flap. A man crawled out from under it, on his knees and one hand. The other hand held a can of strong cider. He was dirty, unshaven, clothes shapeless and greasy. Michael couldn’t see his face, but he recognised what had once been a well-tailored suit.

  He’s lost it, tho
ught Michael. I should pretend I don’t see him, just keep walking along this canal. It has to go somewhere.

  Towse turned his head quickly, as if he’d overheard the words that Michael hadn’t spoken. His face was dirty. There were bruises on his left eye and cheek.

  Michael! There you are! I was just coming to look for you. But Wojciech was telling us a very funny story, and I didn’t want to interrupt.

  Wojciech?

  Come on, through here.

  Towse lifted the fence for him, smiling encouragingly.

  Michael stood his ground.

  What happened to you, Towse?

  What do you mean?

  You look like you’ve been beaten up. It’s the middle of the day and you’re already drinking.

  Towse raised the can of cider in a toast.

  When in Rome.

  He took a swig, shuddered, staring past Michael, back towards the bridge.

  Where’s Aoife? Don’t tell me she’s not here.

  Aoife’s father had a newspaper in one hand. The other held the front door, as if he wasn’t sure whether he should let in his only daughter. I’m in trouble, she found herself thinking. She shrank into the old defensiveness, felt that familiar urge to be anywhere else. That kid never goes away. She’s still hiding inside me.

  You’re looking well, she said.

  So are you.

  He hugged her awkwardly.

  Mum told me you were sick, Dad.

  He didn’t release her. She couldn’t see his face.

  You should have been here days ago, he said.

  You obviously got better.

  Pulling away, he looked at his slippers, the door handle, then last of all, her face.

  Your mother’s in the living room. She’ll tell you all about it. We were just making tea. I’ll go and get it.

  He stood back, letting her pass. The hallway, with no window to the outside, was narrow and dark. The walls were lined with photos and etchings of famous horses, and jolly prints of Edwardian hunting scenes. View Halloo. The Stirrup Cup. They had brought them from the old house, where the walls had more space for them, and where there were living horses outside in the yard. These pictures had always depressed her. The horses they showed her were dead.