Ah, but if you’d to wake early to hunt these lands,
and continue from here up to Ballinaboula,
then climb the steep hill to reap the sheaves,
and proceed to threshing in the barn,
then you, too, would be hungry, and as keen as me.
In the jocularity of such exchanges between the lady of the house and those in her employ, we sense something of the atmosphere that Máire Ní Dhuibh created around herself and her children. As a boss and as a mother, she prized a quickness of intellect and a certain audacity in conversation, which others responded to, remembered, and recounted.
Once weaned from the borrowed breasts of her foster-mother, little Nelly returned to Derrynane, laughing with her twin from stables to beach to forest. Overhead, branches hummed the whisper of the ancient oaks for which the place was named ‘Derrynane’, an Anglicisation of ‘the great oak forest of Saint Fionán’. I want to hear the song that forest sang to Eibhlín Dubh as a girl, but I can’t follow her while closed snugly within my own small rooms. I begin to consult maps. I circle dates on the calendar. I ready my car keys.
—
It’s spring by the time I arrive at Derrynane to find that even in the depths of that forest, the aural tug of the tide turns the head like a magnet, letting me find my bearings as little Nelly did.
I’m alone on the beach where the sand stretches before me, countless fragments of shell and stone and quartz smashed into a new whole, a morning strand unmarked as yet by human presence. An empty page. Back then, it held new footprints every day, and the breeze held brief snatches of Portuguese, French, and Spanish. At low tide, the twins could scramble on foot to Abbey Island, just as I do.
Soft, the ground that met Nelly’s skipping toes, Mrs O’Connell’s long skirts, and now, my own heels. I turn, wanting to photograph the sight of my footprints in the sand I’ve longed to see, but in squinting at my phone screen I stumble over something. I catch myself and lift the obstacle: a blue-green rock, fist-sized, split by three intersecting bands of quartz. I choose to read it as an omen, a metaphor for intersecting existences, a sign that the three women I follow once walked here too. As I turn to the island, the stone grows warm by my skin.
Clambering up the island slope, I imagine the twins skipping through the squat juniper bushes, past wildflowers and the jagged greens of nettles. I feel certain that were Eibhlín Dubh to stand by my side now, she would immediately recognise this place, so little has changed, beyond the occasional rock tumbled by sea-gales, the ever-increasing number of gravestones, and the new cargo held below. In a corner of the ruined church, I find Máire’s crypt:
She survived her husband 22 years
and was a model for wives and mothers
to admire and imitate.
Running my finger over the swirl and twist of these letters, I find myself saying her name, again and again. Am I summoning Eibhlín’s mother or keening her? ‘Máire,’ I say, ‘Máire.’ I stand in silence a moment, and realise that I’m waiting for a response. No voice speaks back, but the wind rises to lash my hair against my cheek, sharp as a slap.
—
The path from the beach towards their home led the girls through the forest. Now, by the same path, I follow, through leaf-light that feels both present and antique. I move in a way I have never moved before: I amble slow, then slower still, in the hope that I might see something that could deepen my sense of Eibhlín Dubh’s early days here. A little west of the house, I pause under gnarled oaks and beech trees, my heart fluttering like a bird. A tree has stumbled over, storm-blown. Embedded within its toppled tangle of root and soil are the remains of an old wall, and within that tangle is a door. It must have been swallowed by decades of the tree’s growth, only to be exposed again by its fall. To scramble through, I would have to press my body close to that damp earth. I do. When I emerge, my knees are wet, and I feel different, though I can’t say how. My right breast is already tingling. I walk on.
Ahead, I sense a lios before I see it, and though I fear it, I walk towards it. I know many scoff at the old tales that surround these ancient ringforts, but I refuse to shed my reverence for such dark and holy places. Beyond the house I grew up in, a lios interrupted the horizon. This was the heart that convulsed through all my inherited fears, dark and bleak and full of secrets, and though I stared at it often, I never dared approach it. All through my childhood I was told of the hazards that such places held: Others dwelled there, Others that our people had found to be very old and very shrewd, and those Others had been known to swipe girls like me. In school I was taught another way to translate the text of this landscape: ringforts were defensive enclosures that once sheltered farmsteads from wolves and thieves, we were told, and the stories attached to them were merely piseógs, or superstitious folklore. Mapped from above in my history textbook, a ringfort resembled an ‘O’, which reminded me of a cave mouth in a cliff, or some sort of portal. I did not want to know where such holes might go. The fabric of fear cloaked the image so thoroughly that I kept my distance. Today is different, though. Today, I feel that I am being led towards the lios by someone else. I can’t resist it.
I walk closer, thinking that I see a shadow under the wall – or in the wall? Something is there. Something – dark – something – ajar. I find that what I had taken for the ringfort’s perimeter wall is in fact a ring within a ring, and in between is a hollow chamber, like an inner corridor or a sequence of narrow rooms, still partially roofed with boulders. I have never seen anything like it. I poke my arm into the dark, feeling around the cold inner surfaces of the stones, patting blindly as though seeking a light switch in a darkened room. Then I give up and climb high. From above, I see that this fort is an elegant souterrain.
The word ‘souterrain’ holds its roots in French, drawing itself from sous (meaning ‘under’) and terre (meaning ‘earth’). Underland. Underfoot. Underground. Under us. The sense of an ancient form constructed over a hidden architecture of depth – even this brings to mind the Caoineadh. I wonder what more I might find if I were to wait here a while. Although I am growing impatient to drive home to my children, I sit on the edge of the lios a moment and let my hands roam its surfaces, clothed in its rich green cape of grass and brambles. The position of this structure feels sheltered, almost cosy, in its nestling between the trees.
As I sit, a distant choreography of cloud and sunlight draws itself on my body. My fingertips stroll the stones. For what feels a long time, I sit and wait for this place to let something slip, to release some secret that might allow me to feel closer to the girl whose head once swivelled to the shout of two syllables through this forest: Nel-ly, Nel-ly. I think of the beginnings of growth she has already provoked in me. A tickle on my fist opens my eyes to find a small leaf bustling against it. Irritated, I shove it away and try to return to my reverie, but my gaze is already distracted, sprinting after its stem. From every tiny nook my fingers find the tenacious vines of wild strawberries. I see them in that moment, then, twin girls, one dark, one fair, their lips blushed with strawberry juice.
—
As a teenager, Nelly grew wild, so wild that at fourteen, her mother married her off to an old man recorded only as ‘Mr Connor’, who lived five hours away. Look: Nelly is tossing her comb into a chest with a small violence now, followed by a pair of nightdresses, embroidered stockings, and a locket. She slams the lid, then locks it. She embraces her twin sister tightly, but if they whisper, we are too far away to hear their words. When Nelly leaves Derrynane, a thousand sharp ripples glint their goodbyes.
—
I’ve read that a dowry in the form of sheep, horses, and cattle would often be driven ahead of a bride’s carriage, so I send black cows trotting a narrow road and imagine Nelly pouting in the carriage that follows. A traditional ‘hauling home’ would demand that the bride’s vehicle be heaved along the last stretch to a rowdy chorus of ‘Óró, Sé Do Bheatha Abhaile’, so as they approach their destination, watch their ho
rses untethered as a merry crowd grabs the carriage instead. Nelly enters her marital home to whooping and applause, a fine wife everyone hopes will bring old O’Connor an heir. Within this house a harp is waiting. Once Nelly steps in, every one of its strings snaps. Tick. Tick. Tick. This oddity is read by all present as A Very Bad Omen, a fact communicated by the relay of a communal gasp that ripples through the crowd, and a tide of elbows poked in ribs. Unusual, to witness an omen in its birthing, when most omens can only be read in reverse. Once those strings split, every eye turns on Nelly.
Had no clear consequence followed the omen, this story would never have been told and retold until its echo grew strong enough to reach us. Within six months, however, her husband is dead, and his death lends doom to those strings, turning an ordinary (if strange) occurrence into a story worth repeating. Nelly must don her darkest frock and stand over his corpse to perform the text expected of her, before the same audience of eyes that witnessed the snapping of the strings. Some say she keened him, others that she sat back merrily cracking nuts at his wake, but either way, Nelly finds herself a widow at the age of fifteen. When she returns to Derrynane, she does not return pregnant.
Here: silence.
How I wish that someone had thought more women’s words worthy of a place in that old secretaire. All the diaries and letters and ledgers I imagine in female handwriting, they must have existed once, until someone tidied them into a waste bin, tipping them neatly into oblivion. We are left with only the judgment of Mrs O’Connell (herself writing across both distance and decades) to gauge a sense of the aftermath of Nelly’s marriage. Although Nelly ‘neither entertained nor professed any special devotion for her husband, she regretted, on her return home, the loss of liberty and influence of the mistress of a household’.
I grow glum for this girl. I’ve become so accustomed to listening for echoes of her life in the life I know that she feels as real as any other unseen presence – as real as the disembodied voices on the radio, as real as the human chorus of the internet, as real as the roots stretching unseen under weeds, as real as the dog who howls beyond our hedge. She is real to me, as I follow her struggle from Derrynane to her failed marriage and back again; she is as real as I am.
I recognise how deeply different Eibhlín Dubh’s life is from mine, and yet, I can’t help myself in drawing connections between us. When I was a teenager, I, too, found myself staring down at a dead body, and I, too, found myself a failure. I was drawn to that moment by a room.
6. the dissection room
Is aisling trí néallaibh
do deineadh aréir dom
Last night, such clouded reveries
appeared to me …
—Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill
the first time I entered the room was in a dream.
In the dream, light was blazing through tall windows, and a number of indistinct forms were hovering at hip height, like mountain ranges under blankets of snow. The room felt recently emptied, as though a crowd of people unknown to me had just left; and in that brief moment of the room’s emptiness I was suddenly present, a haunting.
When I woke, I pushed myself up on my elbows, shivering in disorientation and leftover awe; I shuddered as though hauling myself up from a river. The red digits of my stereo glared 08:52. It was a sunny Saturday morning and I had overslept by three hours, which meant that I’d scuppered the first six of the fifteen study windows I’d plotted for my morning. Exam season was approaching. While my school friends were choosing between apprenticeships or courses in nursing or law, I had decided that there was one path above all others that would impose a steady structure on my future.
For a number of years, I had quietly observed our family dentist at work. He was an amiable man, calm and friendly, and it appeared to me that his working day involved a finite number of problems, each easily resolved by a series of well-defined manoeuvres. Even the sight of a broken tooth stretched from my own small, bloody palm had presented no difficulty to him. When I volunteered for work experience in his sunlit rooms, my instinct was confirmed: this was a good life. If I could secure high enough grades to study dentistry at university, it could be my life, too: safe, steady days, and a safe, steady paycheque.
My problem was that no one in the adult world agreed. The career-guidance teacher had spoken to my parents, frowning at the results of my aptitude tests and describing two options: teaching or teaching, either to children or teenagers. But the more adults who warned me that I was making a mistake in daydreaming of dentistry, the more determined I became. Beyond my smoking and drinking and the merry-go-round of dodgy boyfriends, I’d made dentistry the battleground of my teenage rebellion. I’d show them. I’d show all of them. I simply had to memorise a fixed volume of information and then release it on an exam paper. Easy.
I set to studying in every hour I could find: at home before the cows had even begun to crush their cud, during free periods at school, on the bus, and as I strode the small boreen home again. Even when I sneaked behind the school for a smoke, I fumbled for the list of French verbs in my pocket. I needed to learn by heart the conjugation I found most difficult, the Past Imperfect, in which the past was actively continuing. Je désirais: I was desiring, I was wanting, I was longing; the condition was never-ending. I turned every available moment of my life into an opportunity for rote learning. There were chemical equations to memorise, as well as verses of Yeats’s poetry, definitions of cellular plasmolysis and crenation, an entire essay on the Ottoman Empire between 1453 and 1571. There was so much I needed to do. I needed to memorise the laws of genetics, how the processes of transcription and translation differ in DNA reproduction. I needed to practise quadratic equations. I needed to solve for x and for y. I couldn’t afford to waste any time, but now, I was waking far behind schedule, my body still thrumming with exhilaration at my dreamed vision.
When I threw open the door to my parents’ bedroom I found them chewing buttered toast and smiling in sunlight, as radio headlines hummed in the background. I told them how I’d dreamt a church-kind-of-place and that it felt so real, that I knew this must be an omen that everything was going to be OK, that I could see it all so clearly now. My dad was gathering their cups. ‘You need more sleep,’ he smiled. By this point, the dynamic of our conversations on my future was well established. ‘If you chose Arts you could study four different subjects,’ my mother would say, ‘you love history, you could do that, and English, if you wanted to, and philosophy, and anything else you wanted!’ They made an Arts degree sound like Christmas, but I felt certain that it would lead to no job, no safety, and no control. I knew they were worried about me: that I was studying instead of sleeping, that I wasn’t eating, that I was thin and tense and smoking too much. I knew they thought that if I chose a path that demanded less of me, that I would be happier; I also knew that they were wrong. I’d be seventeen soon. I had a plan. I could make it happen.
In the shower, I focused on the diagram of the small intestine I’d taped to the outside of the glass and repeated the labels to myself until they sounded like prayer: epithelial cells, microvilli, lymphatic lacteal, lumen. I closed my eyes and repeated them as the image reconstructed itself in my mind: lumen, lumen, lumen. Scald-water rose from my arms in a haze, dissipating from skin to air.
—
The second time I entered the room, a corpse was waiting.
That morning, I’d opened my eyes in a strange bedroom to the sound of a river. I’d won a small scholarship that allowed me a bedroom in a shared campus flat, and on my first night, and every night afterwards, I slept with my window open, letting the sound of the Lee soothe me to sleep. I dressed, pinned up my hair, drank a glass of milk, smoked four cigarettes, triple-checked my bag, slid foam headphones over my ears, and pressed play on my walkman. The Pixies roared in my ears as I marched up the hill, checking my campus map twice as I went.
In the registration queue for first-year pre-medical students, the others spoke with the honeyed vowels of pr
ivate schools. I read them hungrily, my classmates: their tans, their gestures, and the slant of their collars. We each carried brand-new dissection pouches purchased in the university shop along with a heap of textbooks. When I overheard some jokes about inherited lab coats, I translated the underlying text to myself. My own was factory-new and heavily starched, an abrasive skin I’d buttoned myself into and now couldn’t shrug off. As I sat in the lecture theatre, my neck itched wildly, but I held my spine tight, and restrained myself from scratching it.
A lecturer strode in and the room quietened. The technician slid a video into the VCR. The TV flickered, then resolved into an image of a naked body. Dead, I thought. Dead? Dead. A friendly voice began to narrate proceedings:
THORAX. Observe the scalpel’s neat incision, beginning between the clavicles, down the sternum, to the umbilical. The edges of the incision are held firmly. A smaller scalpel is preferable at this point, to explore beyond superficial layers of fat and fascia. Once the skin is removed, observe the ribs and their intercostal musculature. Clear the pectoral muscles from the rib cage with care. A handsaw is –
As the video stuttered and, finally, failed, the technician gave the machine a weary thump. When nothing stirred, the lecturer led us into the lab, handing each of us a pair of latex gloves as we entered. With a jolt, I found myself standing in the landscape I’d dreamt months before. The same high ceiling, the same blazing windows: it was all precisely, eerily the same. Even those weird mountainscapes – about ten of them – were the same, but this time, rather than hovering, each one was supported by the legs of a trolley and covered by a sheet. Unlike my sleeping self, I could guess what lay below. How had my dream revealed this room to me, in all its vividness? The shock of the recognition was such that it forced a bodily response: a cold sweat began to form on my scalp and my gloves felt too tight suddenly. For one long, suspended moment, I was stilled in bewilderment. Then a tall girl jostled past, and my legs moved me to follow her.
A Ghost in the Throat Page 6