The Dazzling Truth

by Helen Cullen

  It was the first time Murtagh could remember when all his four children went to bed with no complaints. As if they, too, were glad to see the day’s end. Later he caught himself in the act of pouring Bosco’s dog food into his bowl as if nothing had happened, then forced himself to gather the dog’s belongings and carry them out to the shed. As he walked back across the lawn, undeterred by the damp settling into his socks, he heard the low moan of the last departing ferry on the wind. It struck him that Fionn was gone, and no one had been there to say goodbye. He crouched before Bosco’s grave and flattened the clay with the palm of his hand, wondering how he could ever have fallen so much in love with a dog. It was the first time the children had been exposed to a death, and it felt much too soon.

  Murtagh stood under a scalding shower and wept.

  He wept until the water ran cold.

  And then wept while he stood there shivering.

  Wept as Maeve opened the door of the bathroom and stood watching him for a moment, her face pale, hair matted, Nollaig’s note in her hand.

  Wept while she held up a towel for him to walk into.

  As she sat beside him on the bathroom floor, her arm around him, rubbing his back in small circles.

  And then, without a word, they went to bed.

  Inis Óg: August 1994

  “I THOUGHT WHEN you said we were going camping we’d be going a bit farther than our own back garden,” Nollaig protested with a pout, a pillow shoved under one arm, a six pack of Tayto under the other.

  Maeve rolled her eyes at her daughter as she spread her own tattered yellow sleeping bag on the grass beside their tent. “Camping isn’t about where you go, darling,” she said. “It’s about the adventure of sleeping outdoors, under the stars, breathing the night air in our lungs. And besides, this way, we can still use a proper loo.”

  Murtagh opened the back door, balancing a tray with mugs of hot chocolate and a basket of cocktail sausages dribbled in mustard and ketchup. The twins burst past, almost toppling him over, carrying a Thomas the Tank Engine duvet between them. “We’re eight now!” Dillon shouted. “So we can stay up as late as we want, can’t we, Mammy?”

  He was wearing mismatching pajamas and red slippers on the wrong feet. Maeve pulled him into her lap and swapped the slippers over. “Tonight, you certainly can. Have you brushed your fíacla?” He bared his teeth and pushed his face close to hers. “Gleaming,” she said, and kissed him on the nose.

  “Mammy, Mammy, check mine.” Sive opened her mouth wide and Maeve shone a torch inside to give a thorough inspection. “Excellent work.”

  Maeve stood up, clapping her hands. “Now it’s time for the performances.”

  She stepped onto the wooden pallet Murtagh had positioned in the garden; four tall ivory candles perched on saucers in each corner to denote the stage.

  “For tonight’s concert, each child will take to the stage in alphabetical order.” She looked across the grass at her children. “So, who does that mean goes first?”

  “Dillon!” Mossy shouted, “D for Dillon!” Murtagh high-fived him and he beamed, while Dillon reluctantly stood up on the pallet.

  “I’m going to tell some jokes,” he said, shyly at first. “But if you’ve heard them before, you have to laugh anyway. Them’s the rules.” When he was nervous, he developed a slight lisp.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Maeve announced, “I bring you the comedy stylings of Dillon Moone.” Murtagh wolf-whistled and flashed his torch on and off at the stage.

  Dillon started his routine, barely pausing before each punchline and the next joke. It was hard to follow, but he laughed so hard himself it became infectious.

  What’s brown and sticky? A stick.

  What did one snowman say to the other? Can you smell carrot?

  What do you call a dinosaur that’s sleeping? A dino-SNORE.

  What is fast, loud and crunchy? A rocket CHIP.

  Why was 6 afraid of 7? Because 7 8 9.

  Why did the cookie go to the doctor? Because he felt crumby.

  How do we know the sea is friendly? It waves.

  What do you call a funny mountain? HILL-arious.

  Sive didn’t understand all the jokes, but she laughed the loudest, running forward to plant a sloppy kiss on Dillon’s face as he gave a big bow and stepped off the pallet stage. She idolized him, even though it was Mossy who took the best care of her. She was only the first of many who would love Dillon unconditionally in his life, spoil him with her love and prevent him from ever truly learning from his mistakes, but it would have been impossible to predict then how his heart would one day harden as he returned his little sister’s embrace.

  Nollaig was already standing up, waiting for her father to introduce her.

  “Now, for something a little different, Nollaig June Moone will read to us her prize-winning essay on the hole in the ozone layer, ‘CFC U Later.’”

  “Not again,” Dillon moaned, his mouth stuffed with cocktail sausages. “I’m sick of CFCs.”

  “Now, now, son,” Murtagh interrupted. “You appreciated an attentive audience for your comedy repertoire, so please show your sister the same courtesy. I, for one, can’t get enough of the CFC chat.” Nollaig stepped up onto the pallet, pushed her glasses farther up her nose and began.

  “CFC is an acronym for chlorofluorocarbon. These are hydrocarbons that contain carbon, chlorine and fluorine. CFCs are often found in fridges and spray cans such as deodorants or air fresheners. They are—”

  Dillon started to make loud snoring noises, and Mossy and Sive buried their faces in the pillows to smother their laughter while Nollaig continued obliviously. Maeve poked Dillon with her foot until he stopped. While Nollaig persevered through seven pages of her notes Maeve reclined against Murtagh’s knees and he rubbed her shoulders. He whispered in her ear, “You weren’t having an affair with a scientist before Nollaig was born, by any chance?”

  She slapped his knee and whispered back, “That’s all you, darling, I’m afraid.”

  “And that is why—” Nollaig paused for dramatic effect, putting down the notes and clasping her hands together before she continued “—we must all unite and shout, ‘CFC-U-Later.’” She waited a moment for her applause, but her parents chimed in a beat too late, and she stomped off the pallet and plonked down on her sleeping bag with a disappointed sigh. It’s not easy saving the planet when you’re nine.

  “Excellent work, darling!” Maeve called out as she crawled across the grass toward the stage. “Entertaining and educational—what more could we ask for?” Nollaig didn’t meet her eye but focused instead on submerging marshmallows in her hot chocolate, enduring the burn on her fingertips.

  “And now for our penultimate performance, we have a double act extraordinaire. I present to you Tomás aka Mossy Moone and Sive Moone.”

  Mossy gripped his electric-blue ukulele hard in his right hand and Sive’s sweaty palm in his left. They had been practicing for days, but he still didn’t think they were ready. He sat on the edge of the pallet and plucked each string to check it was still in tune. Maeve nodded at him reassuringly, and then he began strumming the three chords of “This Little Light of Mine.” Sive joined in at the wrong time, forgot which verse she was on and sang in a completely different key but performed with total conviction. It was ridiculous and sensational, and the family cheered madly at the end. Sive hid in the folds of her mother’s nightdress while Mossy carefully packed away his ukulele in the tartan case, the one he’d requested to be just like Fionn’s, and brought it back indoors for safety.

  “Is it your turn, Mammy?” Sive looked up at her mother. “Will you sing us a song?”

  Maeve looked over at Murtagh, who gave her a big thumbs-up, so, with feigned shyness, she stood barefoot on the pallet and began to sing about all of her favorite things in a perfect imitation of Julie Andrews. As she reached the final chorus
, Murtagh handed her a pillowcase and she moved through the children, producing for each of them a present wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. For Nollaig, a red-and-black-checked notebook with a yellow pen tucked into the spine; for Dillon, a Slinky that he immediately started chasing around the garden; for Mossy, a cassette of play-along ukulele classics; for Sive, a fluffy-cloud teddy with a smiling face and long, fluttering eyelashes. All to become new favorites.

  When they eventually settled down, no one wanted to sleep inside the big blue tent, so they arranged their sleeping bags on the grass in a circle with their heads almost touching in the center. Maeve listened to her children wriggling and burrowing down, and when a calm fell, she said, “Let’s all take it in turns to say one thing we like and one thing we don’t like.” She paused. “You know that’s sometimes all you have to go on in the world, trusting your own instincts, my loves. I’ll go first. I like sleeping outside with my family, when the stars are shining like light bulbs in the sky. I don’t like when some of those same people get toast crumbs in the butter.”

  Sive giggled and whispered, “Sorry, Mammy,” and her mother leaned over to kiss her cheek.

  Murtagh was next. “I like when I have all my pots made for the week and know I have the whole weekend to relax with my mad Moones. I don’t like when I get hay fever and can’t stop sneezing. Nollaig?”

  “I like winning essay competitions. I don’t like PE, especially camogie,” she said.

  “I’m with you there,” Maeve answered. “I always hated gym, too. All that unnecessary sweating. Awful.”

  Dillon piped up next. “I like free-wheeling on my bike. I don’t like essays about CFCs.”

  “Daddy!” Nollaig shouted. “That’s not fair. My essay can’t be the thing he doesn’t like. I want to change mine. I don’t like when Dillon is a pain.”

  “Shhh, love,” Murtagh said. “He’s only teasing. Dillon, can you think of something else you don’t like, please, son?”

  “Fine, I don’t like cheese.”

  “Lovely,” Murtagh said. “How about you, Mossy?”

  “I like learning new songs on the uke. I don’t like that Fionn isn’t here to teach me any more.”

  “Aw, Moss,” Maeve said. “I’m sure he’ll come visit again soon and you’ll have loads of new songs to play him. Sive, are you still awake, love?”

  “Yes, Mammy. I like singing with Mossy. I don’t like when you get sad.”

  Murtagh reached out and took Maeve’s hand.

  “Well,” he said. “I think we should all close our eyes now and try to get some sleep. The back door is open if you need anything during the night. Good night, my dears.”

  “Daddy!” Sive called. “I didn’t get a kiss good-night.”

  “Oh, you never miss a trick,” he said. “I’ll come and do the rounds.”

  He crawled out of his sleeping bag and planted a strong kiss on each child’s forehead.

  Sive whispered in her mother’s ear, “Will you carry me inside to the loo, Mammy?”

  “Carry you?” Maeve smiled. “You’re a bit big for that now, aren’t you, darling?”

  “I know,” she said, reaching up her arms. “But just one last time, then?”

  Maeve scooped her daughter up and held her tight as she carried her indoors, her face buried in her hair.

  When she returned, she lay down on her back with her eyes closed. Murtagh stood over her, watching her diaphragm rise and fall with deep breaths. In the moonlight, she glowed unnaturally bright. He swallowed a sense that her future was written in those blue veins that ran in rivulets under her porcelain skin, like tiny cracks in a vase. Would a weakness in the work eventually cause it to shatter? Or were the fault lines where the strength was?

  He crouched down and rubbed her feet through the sleeping bag; Maeve pulled away, but he tugged her foot harder and she sat up on her elbows to see him beckon her with a tip of his head. She sighed, but slid out of her bag and followed him around the side of their house to the front wall.

  “Do you remember we used to call this our worry wall?” he said. “No worries allowed past the gate.”

  She climbed up and sat with her back to the house, her bare legs grazing the damp cobblestones. “If my mother could see me, she’d say I’d get a cold in my kidneys sitting here.”

  Murtagh stood behind her, rubbing warmth into her arms, and she leaned her head back against his chest. He inhaled her apple smell, and swallowed hard.

  “Will you do the nightingale poem for me, love?” he asked, his voice muffled by her hair.

  “Seriously? I don’t know if I remember—Are you sure? Keats? Now?”

  “Do it for me, my darkling, whatever you remember.”

  “Maybe just a little bit, then,” she said, and leaned forward, placing both palms down on the mossy wall on either side of her.

  “‘My heart aches,’” she began, paused, and started again, her voice more confident now.

  “‘My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains,

  My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

  Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

  One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

  ’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

  But being too happy in thine happiness,

  That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,

  In some melodious plot

  Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

  Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

  Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

  What thou among the leaves hast never known,

  The weariness, the fever, and the fret

  Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

  Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,

  Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

  Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

  And leaden-eyed despairs;

  Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,

  Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

  Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

  I have been half in love with easeful Death,

  Call’d him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,

  To take into the air my quiet breath;

  Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

  To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

  While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

  In such an ecstasy!

  Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—

  To thy high requiem become a sod.

  Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

  To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

  Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

  As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.

  Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

  Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

  Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep

  In the next valley-glades:

  Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

  Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?’”

  Inis Óg: February 1996

  Dear Diary,

  The wind is blowing from the east.

  What a torment.

  It always brings one of my headaches with it, scattering debris about my feet, unearthing saplings of hope before their roots are secure.

  It carries the voices from the schoolyard into my room as if the radio was blaring static in the air between stations.

  Murtagh loves to hear it, the life from the schoolyard, but it chills me.

  They sound like a flock of seagulls screeching, competing with each other to banish any ounce of silence. I hate to think of my own children among them.

  Are they being drowned out, or are they the d
rowners?

  I sometimes wonder who they are when we aren’t there to witness their behavior, who they will become after we’ve gone.

  Sometimes they feel like strangers to me.

  As if they belong to someone else.

  As if I am babysitting and their real mother will come to collect them soon.

  Not that I could ever say such a thing aloud, not even to Murtagh, who loves to spot the little bits of me and him in them as they appear.

  I hate that game. It frightens me to think what genes I have passed along, genes they may already be hiding.

  Of course, I love them.

  Of course, I do.

  But sometimes I feel I’ve somehow kept them at arm’s length, like I don’t want to become too attached to them, or they to me. That’s absurd, though, isn’t it? And I’ve never been very good at keeping my distance, despite my best/worst intentions.

  I need to know they love me, and sometimes I test them.

  Pull away to see if they will chase me.

  That’s not an easy thing to confess, even to myself, but I do.

  Murtagh never seems to have these struggles. He says your heart gets bigger the more you love. That the more energy he gives the children, the more it energizes him.

  But it’s not more heart I need, just some peace, some privacy, some time to myself.

  I suppose it must be different for men. They’ve never felt their child feed on their own body, take their life source from theirs.

  I feel Nollaig monitoring me sometimes, so suspicious.

  I think she can read my mind. It’s ridiculous, but I find it unnerving and it brings out the worst in me. Last night I felt her watching me from the landing as I massaged rose oil into my legs. Why wouldn’t she come in instead of lurking about?

  In those moments I know I should reach out to her, call her closer, but something holds me back. Instead, I stretched my leg out and slammed the door with my foot without ever looking up.

  What are all these minor aggressions doing to us?