by Helen Cullen
He waved at Mossy, who gave him a big thumbs-up from the stage, as if he hadn’t a care in the world, and managed to snake his way back outside without stopping to speak to anyone else.
A prickling frost was settling on the island. Murtagh brushed past a gorse bush as he squeezed through Ned’s gate and shivered as the cold, damp air penetrated his trouser legs. He felt as if his very life force was draining from him with each numbing step. And yet, his pace was slow. Not even the prospect of the open fire at home could motivate him to move faster as he considered tonight and what the following morning would bring. Little could Nollaig know; her affair was the least of his worries. Soon the island would have a whole new story to obsess over, and one they would not be so easily distracted from. All the hopeful excitement he had allowed himself to build in recent weeks ebbed away with each step.
After the party
The red ember of Sive’s cigarette glowed in the endless black, moving slowly as she rotated her wrist like a firefly circling in the dark.
Murtagh peered into the shadows of the doorway, attempting to discern if she was sitting there alone. He was confused by his own sense of dread; was it worse to creep across the cracking ice beneath their feet with his daughter unaccompanied? Or to have that boyfriend of hers bear witness to their awkward side-shuffles?
The hot ash drew an arc over a rosebush like a half-hearted firework and fizzled away.
Sive turned her head toward him, her face a bowl of milk in the light, and her resemblance to Maeve gave him a chill. She smiled at him in that wry way she had, with only one corner of her mouth turned upward, and the effect never quite reached her eyes. When was the last time he had seen her happy? Heard her laughing from her belly? Not since Maeve had gone, he was sure of it.
When he reached the doorstep, she held out her hand from under Maeve’s houndstooth shawl so he could help her stand up. She toppled forward, but he caught her in his arms, held her there for a moment before she gently pushed him away.
“And there was I thinking Nollaig never did a bold thing her whole life,” she said, while he blew into his hands to warm them.
Murtagh snorted. “You could take a little less satisfaction in it. Speaking of which, where’s your gentleman friend, eh? Fled the island, has he?”
“He’s gone back to the hotel. He’d had enough Moone exposure for one night, but you’ll see him in the morning for breakfast.”
“Oh goody,” he replied, rubbing his hands together, and his daughter whacked him on the arm. “How is your sister doing?”
Sive sighed and pushed in the front door. “Hysterical, of course. They’re all in the kitchen. Every bottle in the house is open on the table, and Dillon is making medicinal punch.”
Murtagh paused for a moment at the threshold. “I think I’ll stay with you at the hotel, Si. Himself won’t mind, will he? I’m sure you have your own rooms anyway, no doubt?”
She rolled her eyes and pushed him down the hallway in front of her. “They’re your children, you can sort them out!”
“You say that like I ever had the power to do such a thing.”
“You always did,” she said, her voice softer. “Even if you chose not to use it.”
Murtagh spun around to face her but she slipped under his arm and through the kitchen door, where the radio hummed in the background. Everyone was speaking at once, but no one was listening to anybody else, which was probably for the best.
“Do you think everyone knows?”
“There’s only orange juice as a mixer. That’ll have to do.”
“The trick to punch is you need to be able to taste the alcohol or you don’t realize how drunk you’re getting.”
“It was all a big misunderstanding.”
“Did someone bring the cake?”
“Will you open the back door? It’s boiling in here.”
“I’m freezing. Pass me my scarf there.”
Kalindi stood at the kitchen counter, buttering slices of toast that Mossy piled to her right. She restacked them on a cracked ceramic plate, midnight blue with white roses, the first piece Murtagh had made in his studio, and placed it in the middle of the table with an open packet of sliced ham and a block of Cheddar cheese. Mossy made her a sandwich first and rested it on a sheet of kitchen towel before her. She smiled at him as he stood up to make an optimistic pot of coffee, as Dillon ladled punch with a soup spoon into the polka-dot glass tumblers Sive had sent home from Spitalfields Market.
“I can never show my face again,” Nollaig wailed as she dragged the makeup from her face with cotton-wool balls drenched in cleansing milk. The used wool, stained orange, formed an untidy mound before her. “I can’t believe she ruined my party. She so did it deliberately, that—”
Murtagh cut her off as he hung his coat on the back of her chair. “Now, Nollaig, I think, of all those involved, Mrs. O’Shea is hardly the most at fault here, is she?”
“Daddy!” she shouted, the sound wet in her throat. “You could try being on my side, you know. I’m the one who has been assaulted, made a laughingstock of in front of the whole island. She was jumping to conclusions anyway. We were only talking, not even...”
“Not this time, eh, sis? But it wasn’t for the want of trying, I’m sure. That Aindí was always a total creep. I can’t believe you went anywhere near him. You’d think Úna would be delighted with a night off.” Sive kicked off her military boots and crossed her feet on the edge of the table as she nudged Nollaig with her foot.
Nollaig stood up and threw a clump of the used cotton wool at Sive.
“Shut up, you. You don’t know anything about it, and it’s not like you’ve won any prize yourself with that Tim Burton wannabe. You had the whole of London to find someone and that’s who you get lumbered with?”
Sive flicked the cotton wool from her lap onto the floor and glared at her sister as everyone tuned into how quickly things were escalating between them. Dillon topped up Nollaig’s glass and swiped Sive’s feet off the table. “Now, ladies, we’ve had enough drama for one night. Let’s have a toast, shall we?”
Nollaig looked relieved, but Sive’s face remained unchanged as she stood up.
“Yes, a toast,” she said. “I’d like to raise a toast to my big sister. Thirty years old and not a friend in the world. Reduced to stealing another woman’s depraved husband. May the next thirty years be less miserable.”
“Sive, that’s enough,” her father snapped, but he was too late to stop Nollaig from reaching across the table to slap Sive hard across the face. Her hand left a red sting on her sister’s cheek.
“How could I have a life?” Nollaig shouted. “When I was the one stuck here trying to keep the pieces together? I was the one who stayed behind so ye would have some semblance of a normal life and still have somewhere to come home to.”
“Do you still not get it?” Sive shouted back, shaking her head. “No one wanted you to do that. You made it worse. Trying to replace her, acting the martyr. You. Made. It. Worse. Why do you think we hate coming home here?”
Murtagh stood between his daughters, his eyes glassy, color deepening, but he couldn’t get past a stammer. Mossy pulled him away by the elbow. “Leave it, Dad,” he said. “Let them have it out. It’s a long time coming.”
Dillon sat down and held his head in his hands.
“She’s right, Noll,” he said. “I’m sorry, but it’s true. This place. It’s like...it’s like you’ve tried to keep everything the same, so we’re stuck in that Christmas Eve forever. You couldn’t move on, so this place is this awful shrine.” He looked around the kitchen. “The wallpaper in here has never even been changed—it’s all just stuck.”
Kalindi rubbed his back and said, “I don’t think that’s fair, Dillon. It’s always harder for the ones who stay behind to make the changes. They don’t get such an easy fresh start.”
Sive tur
ned to her. “But they haven’t even tried, Lin! Do you know all Mammy’s clothes are still in the wardrobe? Her things still sitting on the dresser the way she left them? That’s not right. I hate even passing the room in case I catch a glimpse of something.”
Kalindi glanced at Murtagh, who nodded sadly.
“I couldn’t in the beginning. Wasn’t able to give her stuff away. And then it became too important, like whenever I did it would mean I was over it, and that day could never come.”
“But you’re never going to be over it,” Sive said, throwing her hands in the air. “None of us will. Don’t you get it? The stuff won’t change that. It just makes everything worse.”
Mossy poured black coffee into a mug and handed it to his father. “Maybe we can do it for you, Dad. I think it would be good for you. For all of us.”
Nollaig sat on the floor, squeezing cotton wool against her eyes.
Sive’s voice dropped low. “What about the boat?”
They all looked toward her, but her father spoke first. “What about it?”
“It’s still in the boatshed, isn’t it? I dream about that bloody thing.” She shuddered. “Can picture it in there in the dark every time I walk on the pier. I feel like she’s still in there inside it. I can’t even look toward the door. Why did you keep it, Daddy?”
He lowered his head into his hands. “I don’t know. What was I supposed to do with it?”
“You were supposed to get rid of it, obviously, like any normal person would.”
Dillon spoke again, “That’s what I thought you wanted to talk to us all about. To see if we wanted any of her stuff before you finally let it all go.”
Murtagh looked confused, upset that this conversation would happen now, when he was prepared for something so different.
“So, what did you want to tell us?” Nollaig asked. “Daddy?”
Sive stood up and started wrestling her boots back on, losing her balance and grabbing her father’s arm to steady herself. “Come on, let’s go. We’re doing this now. Right now.”
“What are you talking about?” Murtagh shouted, his temper finally lost. “No one’s going anywhere except bed.”
Sive darted from the kitchen, her boots pounding on the stairs like muffled cannon fire in the distance. “Daddy, stop her!” Nollaig cried. “What’s she doing?”
“No,” Dillon said. “I’ll go.”
They heard her footsteps run along the landing and into her father’s bedroom. Dillon ran up the stairs after her while the remaining Moones huddled in the hallway, straining to discern meaning from their muffled voices.
“I think I should go up there,” Murtagh said. “I don’t like this.”
They listened to the approach of four feet on the landing, stumbling a little, and then the brother and sister appeared at the top of the stairs. Sive’s dark eye makeup was smudged, Dillon’s face pale but determined. Between them they wrestled a white bedspread filled with a disturbing softness. Nollaig made for the stairs. “They’re Mammy’s clothes! Leave them alone. I swear to God I’ll kill you if you don’t.”
Her father pulled her back as he started up the stairs. “Dillon Moone, Sive Moone, put that down. Right now.”
Sive was calm now, but her cheeks were flushed.
“Nollaig, listen to me. Dad, it’s time.”
“What are you going to do with them? You can’t dump them in the street?” Nollaig wailed. “Not all Mammy’s things.”
Sive tightened her grip on the bedspread and wiped her eyes with the corner.
“I know exactly what we’re going to do,” she said. “We’re going to get the boat, push it out into the water and put Mammy’s things inside. And then we’re going to cremate it.”
Nollaig started sobbing. “Are you mad? Daddy, tell them they’re mad.”
Mossy stepped forward from the doorway to the kitchen and reached for his raincoat, which was hanging on the banister. “A funeral pyre. She’s right. I feel like I’ve been holding my breath waiting for something like this.”
He looked toward his father, who stared back at him helplessly. It was as if with each passing minute he aged another year.
“Mossy! I expect you to be the voice of reason. Well, I’m having no part of it,” Nollaig shouted. “And in the morning when you sober up, you’ll all hate yourselves for this.”
Without saying another word, Murtagh reached for his duffel coat and walked toward the front door, leaving it open behind him.
Kalindi followed Murtagh and waited with him at the gate while Mossy helped Dillon and Sive navigate their bundle down the rest of the stairs, through the hallway and into the lane.
They made a silent procession toward the pier, each refusing to acknowledge how much it looked as if they were parading a funereal shroud across the island.
The moon hid behind a cloud as if to award them some privacy, and the easterly wind stalled to a hush.
At the boathouse, the children hesitated and Sive looked to her father to somehow propel them onward. He pulled the hood on his duffel coat up, and it gave him the look of a monk as he moved quietly to shake the padlock free. The clatter of metal was offensive to their silence, and Sive nudged forward to stand between her brothers. The door swung open, and Murtagh was swallowed by the cave-like interior. He didn’t pull the cord to turn on the light, so no one could see anything; instead they heard the horrible drag of the currach along the gravelly ground toward them. Murtagh backed out of the shed, his arms hugging the bow, and Mossy and Kalindi stepped forward to lift from each side. Sive and Dillon picked up the rear, and the Moone family carried the black crescent of the currach on their shoulders toward the strand, the way the islanders had once carried Maeve’s coffin.
They rested it on the sand and stood around it, their eyes meeting, locking and breaking away while they contemplated what would happen next.
Sive moved first and walked back to the boathouse, where Maeve’s clothes lay in a crumpled pile. She kneeled in the sand and buried her nose in the fabric, but she could not smell her mother there. Kalindi crouched beside her, and they gathered the bundle into their arms and slowly skidded across the sand to where the three Moone men waited. An arm of peacock-blue silk trailed in the sand, like a hand clawing the earth. They tipped the contents into the boat and pulled the bedspread taut across them; Mossy tied it to the edges with the sailor knots he had learned in Boy Scouts.
Murtagh cleared his throat, but no words came as each told themselves the story of what was happening in a way they could understand, in a manner they could bear to remember. A voice carried from along the headland—“Wait, wait for me!”—and they saw Nollaig running along the harbor wall toward them, waving her hands above her head with no coat on, and still wearing her ruined party frock. The skin of her back was cold as marble when Sive hugged her; the sisters clung to each other for a moment, a lifetime of distance resolved in one embrace.
Dillon stepped forward, knelt beside the boat and wriggled a box of matches from the pocket of his leather jacket. He lit one, and then another.
A third.
A fourth.
None would catch; each extinguished by the damp air before even a smolder caught the bedspread.
“We’ll need kindling,” Nollaig said, gulping. “Or petrol.” She paused for a moment before offering to check the boatshed.
A few minutes later, she walked across the sand toward them, a blue gasoline canister in her hand. She’d already twisted the cap off, and handed the can to Dillon, who handed it to his brother. Mossy clenched his jaw and walked the length of the currach, shaking the can as he spread gasoline across the sheet like molasses. He shoved the empty container in the bow of the boat and Dillon lit one final match, holding it close to the fabric. This time it caught, and the flames whooshed across the glowing white cloth, roaring at the Moones as if to say, Is this what you want
ed? You can’t stop me now. They stood watching the fire burn, trying to ignore the smell that curdled up their nose. Then Dillon began to push the boat toward the water.
While Murtagh sat on the damp sand, clenching it in white fists to steady himself, his children waded waist-high into the water to set the boat adrift.
Wet. Exhausted. Frightened. Relieved. Grieving.
They splashed back out of the water and collapsed beside their father in the sand and watched the fire feed. The flames spread and found the canister. It exploded, lighting the sky in an amplification of Sive’s cigarette from a few hours before.
Nollaig broke the silence first. “Do you remember the last time you saw her?” she asked. “I do. She sat behind me at my bedroom mirror, brushing my hair, even though I protested I was too old for that, but I was delighted, really. And then she told me she loved me.”
Sive turned to look at her sister “Her last words to you were I love you?”
Nollaig nodded.
“Me, too,” Sive croaked. “I was lying on my bed listening to Suede, and she came in and lay down beside me. She asked me to play the song she’d loved from the concert we went to, ‘The 2 of Us,’ and we listened to it together on my iPod, sharing headphones. I haven’t been able to listen to it since. And then she told me that she loved me and stayed with me until I fell asleep.”
Dillon’s voice shook when he spoke. “The last time we saw her she brought us to Tigh Ned’s and we tried gin and tonics for the first time.”
“And then,” Mossy continued. “We walked home, the three of us linking arms with her in the middle and doing the Monkees walk. She seemed so happy that night. Talked to us about what being a Moone man meant,” Mossy continued.
“And then when we got home, she kissed us both good-night, and told us she loved us, too,” Dillon finished.
Murtagh reached out, and his four grown-up children found their way into his arms and shook out grief that had been trying to break free for so long.