A Ghost in the Throat

by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

  I wonder what darkness I may leave embedded in my daughter.

  8. oubliette

  Mo ghrá is mo rún tú!

  ’S mo ghrá mo cholúr geal!

  O my love and my dear!

  O my love and my bright dove!

  —Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill

  i had always hoped to name a daughter for the ocean, but lying under the long fluorescent bulbs outside the birthing room, I changed my mind. On impulse, I chose a name that means Light; I don’t remember why. Now, every time I throw open the curtains, my voice moves through the distance of her dreams, calling: Light, Light.

  I lift her and feed her and as we prepare to leave the house, I do something I never did for her brothers. With her fluffy tangle of toddler hair, her inherited shorts and t-shirt, she looks just like them, until I force her hair into tight, tidy ponytails. She squeals and complains and smacks my fingers away, and still, I am compelled to tug her into girlishness. In the mirror that holds both of us, my dark hair shadows her fair, and there, I observe her reflected scowl at her mother: a real little girl.

  It doesn’t take long to drive the children to our destination: a warehouse in an industrial estate. Even from the car park, I can hear the screams that rise from within. I slam the boot. I loathe this place. I force myself to come here and force myself to smile. The doors slide shut. Inside, the volume is close to unbearable. Everywhere, children are screaming, children are running and falling and weeping and laughing and screaming and screaming and screaming. The roof feels very far away, its metal joists punctuated with long silver tubes. Below, I stand bewildered in a mistranslated castle that merges a foam-brick turret with a plastic-ball moat and netted chambers stacked three storeys high. I can nearly read a spiral staircase into the configuration of one corkscrew slide – its exterior may be neon-yellow, but it is very dark inside. Through this nightmare vision, fleeting figures blur by, one girl’s pink sweater morphing into another’s green shirt: glimpsed, then gone. My sons are somewhere among this screeching flock, reckless in hellish merriment, laughing and slamming into other children, leaving them bloody-nosed and weeping, or limping and bleeding themselves.

  I set myself at the edge of the dungeon where toddlers are sliding into a deep pit of plastic rainbow balls. A clutch of parents hovers there, each staring at their own child. My daughter bounces through, then wades back and flops onto my knee, rosy-cheeked and laughing. I want to remember this, so I tilt my phone and hold it at arm’s length like an antique looking-glass. She smiles at my reflected smile, then darts away, leaving only a blur in the photo, and my face, fixed, peering after her. I press delete while she is scrambling back into the ball-pit, giggling, leaping, diving deep, then emerging with glee, having happened upon one large foam ball, a trespasser, squidgy and special among the identical others, and I smile at her delight, until I notice a younger boy wobbling beyond her. He is weeping, his hand opening and opening. My daughter’s eyes follow my gaze and return, seeking guidance. Should she run, holding her precious discovery clutched to her breast? Or should she give it away for another’s sake? I am torn between wanting to encourage her, and wanting to save her from becoming like me.

  —

  I think of all the ponytails that have lain in the post-box on Main Street. There may even be a new one there today, as ordinary as the post-box itself. In that dim metal chamber, carpeted and wallpapered with sacking, a slot of sun is interrupted only by the arrival of more mail. Tucked into one brown envelope, among all the other letters and parcels, is a ponytail. Rewind it.

  See its envelope soar up through the slot and back into a girl’s fist, to be pressed again to her chest. Now, she skips backwards down the street and into a salon again. Un-ding the bell. Reverse her into that room with all its tongs and aerosols, all its combs and blades. There, the envelope is un-licked and its address unwritten, letter by letter vanishing: L-E-Z-N-U-P-A-R. A pat is lifted twice from the child’s head: ‘girl. Good’. The grin slides off her mouth just as she slides back into the chair. In the mirror, her eyes bind to her mother’s once more. The twin blades of the scissors are opening and opening, and she un-blinks, watching strands bind back to themselves, until her ponytail is long and unbroken again. Next, the straightener slides up and up, and her curl returns. Handful follows handful, the braids are re-braided. The silver cloak is un-flipped from her shoulders, the door is shut, and she is back on the street, long braids swaying at her waist.

  What is it to consider oneself a donor – what does it cost us, and how do we gain from it? Having been puzzled by such muddy urges in myself, I often wonder at the ways in which the same impulses occur in others. My screen has led me to witness many similar moments: those who choose to suffer surgery in order to give a kidney to a stranger, for example, women injecting themselves in order to donate their eggs, or those who donate many hours of their lives to train guide-dogs. My own small efforts seem so prim by comparison, as I scroll and click their generosity in envy, wishing I could make myself as useful as others do.

  On Rapunzel’s Facebook page, girls grin from a triptych of photos that is almost always the same, though the faces and backgrounds change. In the first picture, every Emily, Alanna, Aoife, and Emma, every Ella and Lucy, is photographed grinning around the gaps in her teeth, with hair shining all the way to her waist. In the second image the hair is bound; the blade is visible. In the third, her hair is so short that she seems a different girl, holding her newly shorn ponytail aloft like a record fish, her cheeks turned balloons of blush-pride. Her hair will be sent to a charity that creates bespoke wigs for those in need. In the pixels of all those child-eyes, I recognise a glint I know well, and wonder what they will give of themselves next.

  The hair in the post-box is a beginning, and like any beginning, it holds promise beyond the visible. The DNA embedded in shorn hair is a variant called mtDNA, a mitochondrial substance inherited exclusively from the female parent. Although a mother passes this matter to all her children, only her daughters will pass it to the subsequent generation. This ordinary ponytail – drawn and drawn again through the straightener’s hot blades – holds a direct female line.

  —

  While my thoughts have been tangling elsewhere, my child has made up her own mind. The weeping stranger weeps no more. He cuddles the ball to his belly and waddles away, dribble-grinning, while my daughter plops into the ball pit, despondent, her hands empty. I lift her and kiss her freckled cheek. ‘Good girl,’ I say. My mouth is salt; I hadn’t noticed her tears.

  Later, I lie next to her in the dark until she is asleep. The door falls closed behind me as I stand under the hall light, blinking at my reflection, my fingers tidying the black jumble of my hair. Apart. Two mirrors reflect us separately, now: a little dark in the light, and a little light in the dark.

  9. blood in mud

  M’fhada-chreach léan-ghoirt ná rabhas-sa taobh leat

  An ache, this salt-sorrow of mine, that I was not by your side

  —Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill

  there is nothing in life that I want so badly as to visit Eibhlín Dubh’s marital home, Raleigh House. This, I suspect, is the missing jigsaw piece that I need to let go of her life and move on with my own. In the absence of a name for the current residents, I address a letter to the house itself. The house does not reply.

  For weeks, every time my letterbox raps, I hop up in hope, then slump in disappointment. I have failed again. I resort to feeding my obsession through my screen instead, squinting at satellite maps and seeking out old images of the house’s façade. I know it’s wrong to pry, but I can’t help myself. Possession works both ways; every time I google Eibhlín Dubh’s home, something ugly in me whines: Let me in. I download black-and-white photos and zoom until I see it, still fixed to the wall – the eagle that followed Art home from Europe.

  —

  On 25 August 1768, Eibhlín’s body howled open and her first son was born. He was given an inherited name, one shared by Art’s br
other and father – Conchubhar. The fact that his date of birth was etched on Art’s gravestone allows me a rare accuracy that is absent from so much of my clumsy detective work. On finding such a clue, one is faced with the choice of what to do with it.

  A revoltingly nosy woman might take it to the internet. In wondering whether Eibhlín Dubh was pregnant before her wedding, she might seek a website that calculates conception dates in reverse, engaging an algorithm of probability to discover the following:

  Most probable conception dates:

  28 November – 2 December 1767

  Most probable dates of sexual intercourse

  that led to the pregnancy:

  25 November – 2 December 1767

  In pressing Return, such a woman might feel shame. She might ask herself (again) why she is clattering around in the intimate life of a stranger, without permission. Such doubts have been drawing question marks in the margins of my days for some time, though I try to ignore them. What are you doing here? those question marks seem to demand, and Who will gain from this labour? Not I, exhausted and googling conception calculators at 3:15 am. Not Eibhlín Dubh, either, for I am beginning to suspect that none of this quest is truly to her benefit. In death, she would hardly worry over how her life is portrayed by academics. Through all my doubts, the nurse’s voice continues its irritating loop: ‘So what’s all this for, then?’

  —

  Soon, another child was born to Eibhlín Dubh, a boy whose date of birth goes un-noted, sparing him the indignity of future busybodies and their internet calculators. Within three years of her marriage, Eibhlín’s father had died. A year later, Art’s father died too. During these years of griefs and joys, of births and deaths, Art came and went from his regiment in Europe. Eibhlín was often alone; Eibhlín was never alone.

  By the spring of 1771, leaves were opening around Raleigh House again, and the air lilted with the giggle and screech of two little boys, the chatter of hens, and the warm whinny of horses. Eibhlín was pregnant with their third child when Art returned for the last time, dressed in his ‘slender boots of foreign leather, / and the suit of fine couture / stitched and spun abroad for you’. She took pride in her lover’s appearance, how even wealthy merchants’ wives desired him. As their eyes followed Art, so too, I imagine, did their husbands’. Mary must have feared for her twin, for the reckless ways in which Art’s swagger drew attention to all of them. She, too, must have observed the dark that was beginning to gather. Did she feel helplessness in the face of inevitability, as I do? In writing their lives from this distance, I am haunted both by the sense of looming catastrophe and by my own complicity, for in recounting this horror I must inflict it all over again. I wish I could stop the pain this telling will soon cast over Eibhlín Dubh, but I can’t. The past never ends. Or, worse, the past tells us how it ends. Over, it says, over and over again.

  —

  This afternoon finds you in your car. You are by yourself. (This is a lie. You haven’t been by yourself in some time.) You are alone, though, and unspeakably tired. The plot you began has whittled ten pounds from your frame and carved dark hammocks under both of your eyes. You cannot continue like this, and yet, you can’t sense an end to it either. Every radio tune seems to sing your strife, now, just as they did when your teenage heart first broke. You find yourself singing along to all the irksome lyrics you know by heart, in spite of yourself, ‘… and you give yourself away, and you give, and you give …’ and it’s true, you have been giving yourself away, in donating your very thoughts and days to another. Your foot on the brake brings the car to a halt, askew in the margin. Your brow sinks to the wheel, and again, you weep. You idiot: there is no one to blame for this mess but yourself. You chose this path as blithely as a musician picks a sheet of music, giving herself to the precise choreography of movement and sound plotted by a stranger long before. Let it play you to its ending, foolish harpist. Prepare the strings.

  —

  An ill omen for one may be fortuitous for another. Among those who loathed Art was Abraham Morris, a formidable man who had once been high sheriff of Cork. His hatred was reciprocated.

  On a warm Saturday in mid-July, the sound of hooves cantered through birdsong and honeysuckle-scented air. Art swung himself from his saddle in front of Hanover Hall, heels landing firmly on the drive. As he strolled up to the home of his enemy, his horse watched, her bridle speckled with spittle, her sides heaving. Art’s fist thumped the heavy door. Both versions of what followed are recorded in writing, as each party subsequently published accounts in The Cork Evening Post. On 7 October, Morris’s report stated:

  Whereas Arthur Leary of Raghleagh, a fellow of character most notoriously infamous, did, in the evening about 9 of the clock, on Saturday the 13th July last make an attempt on my life at my dwelling house in Hanover-Hall, and wounded one of my servants, and feloniously took from him a gun my property which he carried off for which crimes and several others the said Leary now stands indicted in the Crown Office of this court. Now, I do promise a reward of £20 to any person who will apprehend the said Leery and lodge him in the county gaol within twelve months of this date.

  This notice effectively made of Art a wanted man, and put a price on his head. Within three days Morris’s fellow magistrates in the Muskerry Constitutional Society convened a meeting and nodded their decision. Another notice was soon published, confirming Art’s status as an outlaw in the eyes of the magistrates. A fortnight later, a reply from Art appeared in the same newspaper, noting that –

  having occasion to apply to Mr Morris, as a magistrate relative to some law proceedings, he did for that purpose about 7 o’clock in the evening of July 13th last, repair to Hanover-Hall, the seat of Mr Morris, and there in a very modest and respectful manner communicate to him the purport of his complaint, and who without the least cause of provocation fell into a furious rage, and made use of very indecent, abusive, and ungentlemanlike language to the said Leary, who thereupon quitted his house and was returning home.

  Before he got down the avenue he observed Mr Morris and John Mason his servant each armed with a gun, pursuing him down the avenue, and when Mr Morris advanced within twenty yards of the said Leary, he presented his gun at, and shot and wounded him in the hand, whereupon the said John Mason advanced close up to said Leary and presented his gun at him, which said Leary most providentially wrested from him before he had time to perpetuate that crime in the commission of which his master not intentionally failed and afterwards committed the same gun into the hands of one of his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace, and soon after lodged an information against this Mr Morris for the violent assault and attack upon his life.

  A reader might be forgiven a certain scepticism in both tellings of this event. Despite the price on his head, Art ran his mare in local races, where she won over the other horses, including one owned by Morris. Enraged, his enemy demanded that Art acquiesce to the Penal Laws by selling her for the humiliating (and legal) sum of £5. Art, being Art, lashed Morris with his whip, daring him to a duel. Morris – being Morris – refused.

  —

  On 4 May Art was leaving Raleigh, when he –

  turned back swiftly

  and kissed your two babies.

  Heart of the palm, your kiss for me,

  and when you said, ‘Rise, Eibhlín,

  settle your affairs neatly,

  be firm about it, move quickly.

  I must leave the home of our family,

  and I may never return to ye,’

  oh, I only chuckled in mockery,

  since you’d made such warnings so frequently.

  Art left. He had decided that this would be the day to confront Morris once and for all. First, though, he would stop for a quick drink. Or several. As he drank, Art’s plan was overheard. The eavesdropper drained his glass and rode ahead. Morris smiled at his informant. He had already made an outlaw of Art. Now he could act with impunity.

  —

  Hoof-song drummed Ar
t merrily along his path, but on entering the village of Carriganima, he slowed. Something felt … awry. His soldier’s eye scanned the text of the village, translating any peril that might be lurking there. Yes. There were men crouching ahead. A trap. Art’s heart quickened; mine does too. He turned away from the road and crept towards the stream instead, easing the bit across his mare’s tongue, turning her head and hooves to skid those moss-slimed stones and up the bank, his ankles urging her onwards through the grasses. Only then did he pause to look back. Ha! He had done it! He had outwitted them, the bastards, he had side-stepped their trap. His horse tugged her head high as he laughed and yelled insults at Morris with glee.

  Among those glaring back was a one-eyed soldier named Green. He held an old musket wedged between clavicle and jawbone. Within his weapon was a single ball of lead, stuffed firm by wadding and powder, pushed, primed and ready. Morris shouted one word. FIRE. Every soldier squeezed a trigger. Through the roar and the smoke, only one musket-ball reached Art, lodging with a shock in the warm meat of his body. Green’s fingers quivered, releasing the clenched metal as others patted him rough congratulations.

  Art’s mare strained to lift him to safety, but blood was pouring from his wound, his fingers were opening, and Art was falling, falling, a fistful of her mane tearing away as he fell. That wet length of hair was all he held as he lay in the dirt, his gaze dashing wildly in its final flashes – clouds, thick and close – blackthorn blossoms jigging in the breeze – a hoof – a pair of starlings hurrying elsewhere. The mare looked down at her master, then back to the laughing soldiers, strolling ever closer. Do animals weigh self-preservation against selflessness? This mare chose her path quickly. Some urge turned her, tail high, wind-whipped, to canter away, her reins long and loose. She stumbled, then sprawled a long leap over the hedge, galloping, now, galloping and galloping.