by Helen Cullen
As for romance, an odd rumor had reached him from time to time of her carrying-on with Aindí O’Shea, the owner of the village post/tourist office, but both he, and presumably Aindí’s wife, Úna, maintained a position of peaceful obliviousness. He had certainly never asked Nollaig about it but hoped that she wasn’t suffering over him. What attracted his daughter to Aindí was decidedly unclear, allergic as Murtagh was to his saccharine sweetness and over-reliance on hair gel. He presumed that as a result of the limited choices in island men, Aindí’s advances, through their novelty, had become welcome.
Murtagh’s relationship with his daughter reminded him of those in Victorian novels; a sad widower and the unfortunate daughter who is encumbered by his sadness and her lack of suitor or independent profession. He hated the thought of it, and hoped that one day he would come home to find his daughter waiting to break the news that she was going backpacking in Australia, or had won a place at university, or secured a job in Dublin—anything that would project her forward—but he worried his encouragement would be misinterpreted as lack of gratitude or heavy-handed interference. And so, he waited.
Nollaig, on the other hand, was relatively satisfied with her position. As Murtagh stood peeling potato skins into the compost bucket, she was locking the front door of the shop, content that she had finished boxing up all the orders in time to make the next ferry.
In the darkest part of her heart, in a secret spot of truth, lived a fear that her life on the island had simply saved her from a similar fate somewhere else, one without the easy excuse of her self-appointed responsibilities to explain her loneliness. At least on the island she could call it sacrifice. What would it be called out there?
It had never been easy for her to make friends; she seemed unable to turn casual acquaintances from school or college or work into proper friendships in the way others managed to so easily. And when she did find someone to befriend, she seemed to care too much and ultimately always scared them away. Maybe it was because she didn’t have a passion for anything of her own. She couldn’t remember ever wanting to be anything in particular when she grew up, except maybe married with children. Sive was the creative one, the most like Mammy; Mossy had his books; and Dillon was passionate about music in a way that made her feel the loneliness of one without a tribe. She’d never had any special talents or shone in school at exams or sports or art. It didn’t take much to make her happy; watching Home and Away and Coronation Street in peace, going to the cinema occasionally, using the expensive bubble bath every second Sunday for a good soak. She had tried to develop hobbies, but nothing stuck. Embroidery, baking, gardening—eventually they all became skills that she performed efficiently but without any flair. The only time she truly felt alive was when she was dancing at the céile and her feet flew across the floor as if possessed. She was never short of a partner, though they were mostly married men in attendance. None of the wives saw her as a threat, and nearly all of them were right in that regard. Except for Úna O’Shea, of course, but what went on between Úna and Aindí was none of her business, although it was clear to her that Úna did not know how to make her husband happy. Occasionally she contemplated what her mother would have to say about the Aindí situation, but she chose not to dwell on that, like all the rest of the advice she was forced to imagine her mother might have given but could never know. She tortured herself worrying about the unreliability of the memories that she held of her mother; how slippery her identity seemed to be as time passed. It was difficult to know what was true, a genuine piece of history, and what was the collective narrative the family had all agreed on. They never told anyone how she had really died, for example, just that she had drowned. Without ever making the decision to, they all became complicit in the maintenance of that lie with new people. It was a heavy fiction for the heart.
At the front door, Nollaig noticed the paint was chipping and made a mental note to remind her father to top it up. She was excited to be home—it was the first Friday of the month, the July dance, and although it was too hot for her orange corduroy dress, it was the most flattering on her, so she planned to wear it anyway. She skipped up the stairs and wriggled into it, spraying on extra deodorant until the room was so smothered with the smell of chemical peaches that she started to cough. Her father passed along the hallway and she called out to him.
He swung the door open and then stepped back, waving the cloud of spray away; he was wearing just an undershirt and pajama bottoms.
“Ah, Daddy,” she said. “Why aren’t you dressed? Will you not come with me?”
Murtagh shook his head and held his arms up.
“It’s all right, love, you go ahead,” he said. “There’s a film on the BBC tonight I want to watch, and I’m not in the mood for dancing.”
She released a dramatic sigh as she squeezed her feet into white kitten-heel sandals that were half a size too small. Her frosted pink toenails looked as if they were gasping for air.
“You always say that,” she said. “It’s like you’re determined not to have any fun.”
“It depends on what your idea of fun is,” he said, imitating an Irish dancer hopping on the spot.
She laughed at him as he danced down the hallway. Turning back to her reflection, she heard him rustling in the cupboards for her secret stash of contraband: she’d left a family pack of Maltesers for him that she’d scold him for later, but it made her happy to think of him having a treat, even a little one.
It never occurred to her to want a bigger type of happiness for him; maybe a new love, or a fresh start. When she looked at him, she didn’t see Murtagh Moone, handsome at not-quite fifty and full of potential. She just saw her father, dependable and exactly where he’d always been. Her heart hadn’t the imagination to dream of anything, or anyone, else for him. It was a flaw in her wiring that she wasn’t even aware of; a silent killer, like carbon monoxide spreading through a sleeping house. She was utterly blind to him but believed she saw him in perfect vision.
As only a daughter can.
London: 2009
IT WAS THREE years since Sive had last taken the ferry from the mainland to Inis Óg. She did always join her family for Christmas, but they never spent it on the island. In truth, she hated crossing the sea, had never made peace with the Atlantic since her mother had lost herself beneath its surface. The thought of the boat made her whole body prickle with anxiety.
Without anyone’s intervention, her old bedroom remained an abandoned shrine to her adolescence. Murtagh opened the curtains every morning, aired the room, and closed them again each afternoon. He swept the floorboards that she had painted gray, and dusted the bookshelves, windowsill and dressing table. The candles she had made at school still stood on its surface, lined up in ascending height, alongside her skull-and-crossbones jewelry box and the giant red pencil sharpener that held her collection of Sharpies. Around the mirror, clumps of dehydrated Blu-Tack remained from where she had removed the Polaroid pictures of her friends to take along to London. “In case I don’t make any new ones,” she’d said. “They will keep me company.” Sometimes on the nights when insomnia smothered Murtagh and whispered familiar worries in his ear, he would sit on the bed, pull her purple eiderdown over his legs and read one of her books by the light of the lime-green Anglepoise lamp that Grandma June had bought her as an eighteenth-birthday present. He had fallen a little bit in love with Joan Didion that way, for how she talked to Sive about mothers and mothering.
Sive’s trips home had become shorter and shorter, until Murtagh finally accepted that if he was ever to learn anything of his youngest child’s life, he would have to visit her in London. What little Jeremy told him suggested he either didn’t see her often, or what he did witness wasn’t suitable for her father’s ears. It comforted him to know, though, that Jeremy could help Sive if she needed someone; she probably would reach out to his old friend if necessary. Especially as he knew how unlikely it was she would
turn to her father, and not only because of the sea that flowed between them. Sive’s problem wasn’t just that she’d had less time with Maeve than the others; she’d had less time with the old him, too. The pregrieving father that he still struggled to resuscitate even after all these years. Could there be a new version of him that could learn the language of his children? Did they need that? As much as he did?
Waiting on the platform at Heathrow Airport for the tube to transport him to the center of London, Murtagh filled his lungs with the warm, musky-blanket smell of the underground.
He remembered his first visit to London with Maeve in 1980 for his interview at Central Saint Martins; he had performed abysmally. When the young Brazilian interviewer asked his views on cultural appropriation by potters, he was forced to confess that he didn’t have any, that it wasn’t something he’d even considered before that moment. Twenty-nine years later, he could still feel the judgment curling up his nostrils like a fog, winding down his throat to strangle any voice he had left. Maeve was waiting for him on the steps outside, still a smoker then, blowing perfect O’s into the London footpath while she listened to the Sex Pistols too loudly on her headphones. “Never mind,” she said when she saw his face, and physically shook off the disappointment he knew she felt as strongly as he did.
How would their lives have turned out if he’d been given that job?
If they had built their lives here instead of on that island on that wild edge of the world?
Would Maeve still be with him?
Or would London have taken her much sooner?
And what of their children?
Murtagh tore the Aer Lingus labels from his cabin bag and tossed them into the bin, rubbing his fingers together impatiently to lose the sticky residue. It was exhilarating to be here, although he was relieved to have missed the G20 protest riots the week before, and that Sive hadn’t chosen to exercise her democratic right as forcefully as he and Maeve had in the seventies. He scanned the platform, surveying the other waiting passengers, confident he could easily distinguish all the holidaymakers from the travelers who were coming home. He wondered if he was so easily categorized and stood up straighter, the way he thought a Londoner might.
The tube pulled into the station, eerie with emptiness. Murtagh stood back to allow a Japanese family wearing matching tracksuits to board ahead of him. For a second, he wished he was one of their troop, focused and united. Sometimes he felt all he still had in common with his children was their shared grief, and disappointment in him. He relaxed as a strangely comforting, although automated, female British voice told him to mind the gap, look after his belongings and move down inside the carriage. Through the nineteen stops to Leicester Square, he rocked in rhythm with the train’s motion, his eyes growing heavy. He dozed off at Acton Town station surrounded by his Japanese traveling companions and woke at Green Park to discover they had been replaced by a group of schoolchildren with their faces painted like zombies. He had to change at Leicester Square for the Northern Line; it was tempting to exit the station and stand amid the neon signs and theater revelers to compare it with his memories, but he resisted the temptation in lieu of getting to Sive’s flat sooner.
Ten minutes later, he ascended from the tube into Camden Town and felt assaulted by the cacophony and the electricity in the air. A teenager dressed as Lady Macbeth jostled him out of the way, and he maneuvered along the path to lean his back against the station’s red-tiled wall. With his suitcase clenched tightly between his knees, he rustled in the pocket of his brown sheepskin jacket for the sheet of notepaper on which he’d scribbled directions to Sive’s house. In the dim streetlight, the letters danced before his eyes as he was confounded by his own shorthand. As a mariachi band paraded past, he abandoned all hope of walking and slipped on the curb in his haste to hail a taxi. The cabbie wound down the window to ask where he was going. “You’re only five minutes away,” he said. “You’d be quicker walking.”
“You can take the scenic route,” Murtagh answered as he jumped in, relieved to slam the door on the smells, the sounds, the sights of the city. He shivered, despite the hot air pumping through the vents. It was a shock to find himself so discombobulated. To feel icy fingers poking through the safety blanket he surrounded himself so comfortably in at home. To feel anything at all. What had become of the couple who thrived on the dangerous beauty of this borough once upon a time? Who had kissed in stairwells, up alleys, in car parks and pushed up against chain-link fences? Why had they stopped kissing as if the end of each kiss were a little death of its own? Murtagh touched his lips with his fingertips and threw a kiss toward the sky.
* * *
Sive shared a fomer public housing flat off Delancey Street with two other members of her glam-punk band, Sylvia’s Path—the drummer, Rose, and bass player, Gordon. The four flights of stairs leading up to it stank of urine and damp; plastic bags, broken glass and empty beer cans littered the stairwell. Angry graffiti shouted at him as he carefully picked his way up the stairs after her; the lift was out of order and the sockets where light bulbs once hung dangled like empty nooses. Wrought-iron bars covered the windows and door to number 11. Inside, her self-selected prison cell was only a moderate improvement on the exterior. What would have been the living room had been converted into their rehearsal space, with amps and guitar cases crammed into its eight-foot-by-eight-foot dimensions. A dirty beige brocade curtain blocked a window that looked out onto the street; they couldn’t risk someone spotting the equipment if they were smoking on the fire escape. A torn burgundy velvet chaise longue, stained, ripped and forlorn, half blocked the doorway to the kitchen. On a wobbly table laden with magazines sat wine bottles holding white dinner-table candles and a pint glass filled with plectrums. “Gordon collects them,” Sive explained, giving it a shake.
Black-and-white prints of film noir classics were displayed behind frameless plates of glass: Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, Sunset Boulevard, Laura and The Postman Always Rings Twice. White fairy lights stretched in rows across the ceiling, secured with gray masking tape, and it improved the atmosphere a little. Murtagh longed to escape from this room; Camden High Street no longer felt so intimidating. It had been unclear what the exact sleeping arrangements would be, but Murtagh’s heart sank to realize his daughter was giving up her own single bed to him. He offered to check into a hotel, but his daughter dismissed the idea, questioning if her flat wasn’t good enough for him. He dared not say he thought it not good enough for her.
He followed Sive into the kitchen and twitched at the overpowering smell of bleach. She surprised him by tossing an orange in his direction and blushed when it hit him in the groin. A cardboard box filled with empty wine and beer bottles sat precariously on top of the trash can. It was better not to think about what the little galley kitchen might have looked like a couple of hours before. A sandwich bar, with three high stools, looked out onto the square below. Father and daughter perched there, drinking Earl Grey from cracked china teacups, a sliver of space between them, and watched the shadowed courtyard for signs of life. A white HiAce van reversed around the perimeter at speed and then accelerated out onto the main street; a woman in a tiger-print fur coat walked a Persian cat on a lead; a boy with a blond ponytail in an Adidas tracksuit sprinted from one corner to the other, typing what they assumed must be his times into a mobile phone. From somewhere in the building, the screech of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” played over and over again on a tortured violin. They didn’t say much, but Murtagh liked sitting side by side with his daughter. It was easier than meeting her eyes; they always had this note of expectation, as if she were waiting for him to answer a question she hadn’t asked.
Despite the utter chaos she lived in, it was clear that Sive loved her life there and thrived in the city. Sylvia’s Path had even garnered something of a cult following, and Sive always seemed to be exhibiting her angry paintings somewhere; not usually in traditional galleries but on t
he walls of tattoo parlors, music venues and the hairdressers where she experimented with the varying tones of blue that adorned her blunt bob haircut. Not that she told him any of this, of course. Nollaig showed him the highlights on the internet when he cautiously peered over her shoulder, ready to avert his eyes at any moment. There seemed to be a lot of happiness in her life, but Murtagh worried that her inspiration was driven by anger, bitterness and disappointment. Losing Maeve had perhaps been the hardest for Sive, he thought, if it was possible to compare. Her already melancholic disposition had been magnified in ways too subtle for an outsider to notice, but flashed in neon bright to her father. Before the happening, the sad songs she listened to on repeat brought her joy. He remembered her asking him once why we take such perverse pleasure in hearing other people sing about pain and heartache? Did they make us feel less alone, less misunderstood? They were sitting in the garden at the rear of the cottage, listening to Elliott Smith, her great love at the time, while the rest of the Moones slept. Fireflies were fussing in the brambles and the moon was full. After the funeral, he found her Elliott Smith vinyl stuffed in the trash. He brushed off turnip peelings and rubbed away the stains of teabags, tomato ketchup and curry sauce, and hid the record in the bottom of his wardrobe, in case she ever changed her mind.
As they sipped their tea, Murtagh glanced at her stockinged feet. He remembered one evening back on the island when she had fallen asleep on the couch and her bare foot had slipped from beneath the blanket. The lines of fresh scars around her ankles had destroyed what was left of his heart. At the doctor’s, she had promised to stop, scowling at them both from beneath her fringe, her arms folded around her knees, sleeves pulled over her hands. She had refused to talk to anyone. As his high stool shook a little from the beat she tapped with her feet, he hoped she had kept her word, that she hadn’t just become better at hiding how she released pain from her flesh. Wished he could talk to her about her mother, ask her all the questions he regretted never asking Maeve.