by Molly Aitken
‘Are you all right, Felim?’
I knelt beside him, thought of taking his hands and blowing on them to warm him, bring him back.
‘Felim?’
He was staring over my head; a brief flash of life, of hope, darted over him. Behind me stones crunched and scattered. Enda was stood above us. His face was red from running.
Felim staggered up and fell against Enda, who put his arm around the boy’s shaking shoulders. Felim leant his head against Enda’s cheek.
The tide was rushing in.
‘I thought I’d never see you again,’ Felim said.
‘You’re a fool,’ my brother said. He was stroking Felim’s back, like he was soothing a skittish horse. His movements small and careful.
‘Go home,’ Enda said to me and walked Felim around me, out of the cave.
The sky drained of red and washed with purple but the thought of returning to Mam made me feel lonely. I took the road that wound outside the village and disappeared. The walk woke me. Who would care for me like Aislinn did for Felim? No one. Not Mam or even Kate. Dad cared for me without knowing what really was in me. Enda loved me but he loved Felim more. I was alone.
I passed the lighthouse close to Aislinn’s, but walked inland again so I wouldn’t meet Enda or Felim. I watched my feet and leapt from stone to stone, missing the cracks that cut deep between them. The tourist traps. I stopped. A red coin shone ahead of me. Beyond there was another and another. A trail in the twilight. Blood.
I followed it across the stone landscape, losing it in the dark when I was close to Pegeen and Liam’s cottage. A deep moaning sound leaked from the open door.
The Dead Don’t Talk
Pegeen was sat on the floor by the unlit fire. Her dress was pulled over her head and she was shaking, moans and sudden gasps shuddering from her. Kieran leaned against the wall, his face as white as salt, staring at the table where Liam lay with his green woollen hat still on. One red droplet on the floor by the table leg. I stepped closer. His eyes were open like the windows of a house, but no one was at home. I swallowed.
‘He’s dead,’ my brother said.
He looked up at me and tears were chasing down his cheeks.
‘I was only over to see if he’d come out in our boat tomorrow,’ he said. ‘His was leaking. I told him I’d help him tar it again soon.’
‘Kieran,’ I said. Nothing else would come out.
‘He came in,’ Pegeen whispered. ‘Said he was feeling light in the head. Said he’d just lie down on the table and sleep it off but he’s not got up since.’
‘Will I get Mam?’ Kieran said. ‘You’ll have to get Liam ready for the wake.’
A wail rose up out of Pegeen and curled into me with a wet weight that hung in my chest.
‘Mam won’t come,’ I said.
Kieran, deaf to me, left. I lit Pegeen’s lamps but they fluttered in a draught I couldn’t find. Pegeen groaned on and on to lift the roof, to lift the horror. I knelt beside her on the floor, held her hand and she didn’t push me away. I moaned with her and it was like releasing all the anger I’d tied up. All the tears I’d not spilled for my sister or for Mam’s coldness or for Enda moving away from me rolled out. I was on the edge of some kind of peace when Pegeen stopped, her eyes wide and fierce.
‘You,’ she hissed.
Aislinn balanced at the head of the table, at Liam’s head. Her fingers were tangled into her wet hair. ‘No . . . no. Felim, no.’
‘It’s not Felim,’ I whispered, but she didn’t mean the body.
Behind her stood Enda, his back pressed against the wall and head dropped into his hands. Aislinn clutched at her throat, gasping like she was drowning. My mind was in flight. I had told Felim Liam was Etain’s dad.
Mam strode in with Kieran. She would know what to do. She would know how to care for Pegeen and Liam. She looked at me without surprise, as if she expected to see me in this place of death. She went straight to Pegeen and took the woman’s hand, wrapping a dry shawl around the shaking shoulders.
Kieran went close to Enda. ‘Tell me,’ he whispered.
Enda shook his head violently, as if to get rid of the thoughts, the knowing that was racing into him. Kieran went quietly out the door again.
Aislinn began to keen and her voice was one of such beauty, such sadness, that it ripped through all of us. She didn’t know you’re not meant to keen until the body is being taken out of the house and you’re sending them on.
‘Get out of my house,’ Pegeen shouted. ‘Get out, you devil, you. You whore.’
Silent now, Aislinn stared down at Liam.
I took Aislinn’s hand, led her to the door and watched her weave, unstable, on the rocks off towards the cliffs instead of the way home.
I stared at the dead man. Already the handsome face was drooping, waxy. He wasn’t Liam any more.
Mam crossed herself.
Pegeen slowly walked out the back and returned with a bucket of water. She poured it over Liam’s head.
‘Will you help me wash him?’ she asked Mam.
Liam was the first man I saw without clothes on.
* * *
Everyone came for the wake, passing around Liam’s pipe for a puff and whispering kindnesses to Pegeen. Outside the cottage I heard the other whispers. People were saying Aislinn’s bastard belonged to Liam. This caught like fire in the dry tobacco. Their eyes were sharp as flint.
They whispered Liam was too stable on his feet to trip and fall like the tourists, even if he’d taken the drink he’d never slip. They whispered Felim must have knocked Liam down.
Enda stood by the wall and watched the road but Aislinn and Felim didn’t come.
* * *
That night, I was shaken awake by Enda.
‘Get a bucket,’ he hissed.
‘What?’ I rubbed my eyes, sat up. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Felim’s house is on fire.’
I stumbled into the kitchen but no one was there. I yanked on my shoes, ran outside, grabbed the bucket under the window and raced up the hill and along the top road. The closer I got, the stronger the smell of burning. When I reached the cottage all was dark but smoke billowed towards me on the wind. I tumbled over the wall and through the garden, my free hand covering my mouth.
From the blackness, a hand reached out and grabbed me.
‘Fill your bucket on the beach,’ Enda shouted in my ear as he raced past.
When I got back I was half drenched with the water I carried. Enda snatched the bucket and threw it on the smoking thatch.
‘Are they still inside?’ I shouted.
He shook his head, panting, hands on his knees watching the smoke shoot into the sky and the sparks finally hiss against the roof. We were just two small people and we couldn’t stop the fire.
I walked back to the beach and sat there waiting. As the light turned grey in the distance, Enda came to sit with me.
‘Why was no one else helping? Where were they, Enda?’ I knew, though. No one wanted to help the boy murderer or the mother of a bastard. ‘How did you know their place was on fire?’
‘I tried to stop them, but they’d been drinking.’
‘Someone lit it? They could have killed them.’
‘Yes.’
‘Who did it? Etain’s just a baby.’
‘Jonjoe and some other lads.’
We watched the water creep up to our feet and suck away again.
We returned to Aislinn’s cottage. The thatch was singed and blackened and broken by holes wide open to the sky.
I knocked and Felim pulled the door open. There wasn’t a candle lit in the place. It was black and stank of wet, burnt straw.
Felim said nothing, just stood in the middle of their wrecked home.
Enda hung back at the door.
‘Felim,’ I said. ‘Where’s your mam? And Etain?’
‘Get out,’ he whispered.
‘What?’
‘Get out. Get. Out.’
He came t
owards me and stopped when he was close enough to touch me.
‘They wanted to burn us alive, Oona.’ He said my name and looked at me but it was Enda he was speaking to. ‘They thought we were inside. You told that mam of yours about us. You told the priest.’ He meant about him and Enda, and I realised the priest had had words with them, had pulled Enda away from Felim with God.
I turned to see my brother and the sadness under the streaks of black on his face told me I was right.
Felim’s breath moved a strand of hair across my face. Tears cut white lines through the soot on his cheeks. ‘Leave,’ he shouted, his pooling eyes fixing on me in hatred.
Enda took my hand and pulled me away.
* * *
I found Aislinn later in the orange evening light, staring out to sea. She was alone, without Etain. She came up to me and grasped my wrist.
‘Come with me now,’ she said. ‘If we go home, we’ll be happier.’
‘I’m Oona,’ I said. ‘Not Felim.’
‘I know who you are. You want to leave the island. Now’s your chance.’
‘I’m sorry for all that’s happened to you, Aislinn.’
‘You don’t know my son,’ she said fiercely.
‘No. I’m sorry.’
She blinked at me and peered at my face as if it was for the first time.
‘These are not my people,’ she said.
‘So why did you stay?’
‘For him.’
‘For Liam?’
She smiled and turned back to the water.
I left her, and the memory of the cold grasp of her fingers on my wrist clung to me until I fell asleep that night.
* * *
Two mornings later Aislinn returned to the sea. Old Daithi found her washed up on the shells.
I wept bitterly when her boat was rowed over to Éag. Felim’s glass eyes were dry. He never came back that winter. The little girl, Etain, was left with Bridget. I never asked Daithi which shore Aislinn had come to rest on. I was sure it was the little one below her cottage, where she swam with Liam, and where she had pushed out her son.
Sometimes, when the nightmares woke her, the woman sat up alone by the fire wondering whether her daughter was afraid, alone as she was in the underworld.
She regretted the words she didn’t tell her girl, the stories she didn’t whisper over the crib. She sometimes wished she could see her child again, make a bargain to have her back, even just for a day so they could sit in the meadow and sing and weave their separate tales together until the sun set.
Family
In the little room at the top of her house Kate has left me a cup of tea, now stone cold, and there’s a lump under the covers of the bed that, when I investigate, I discover is a hot water bottle. I wandered Galway for hours, walked along the pier and then out to Salthill where I stopped in a pub and took out the Aisling notebook the old man gave me, but I couldn’t think of how to tell Joyce I was sorry. Aislinn would have told her daughter the truth about everything if she’d had the chance. I finished my pint and left. When I got back it was late evening and the windows were dark, but Kate had left the door open.
The chilly edge is kept at a distance by the gas stove in the corner. The room is small, made for a child, and the bedding smells of lavender and mould. At the end of the bed is a blanket made of wool spun by Mam. I’d know her uneven yarn anywhere. I sit and look at it, without touching, but then I can’t resist and lift it into my lap. I run a finger along the ribbing. It was knitted for us by Bridget, who was always the best with the needles. She would make patterns as delicate and complex as the plants that weave over each other in a meadow. When I was small Mam and I had walked up to her little house to ask her to make it for Kate’s birthday. We’d brought the cream to give her as payment, but Bridget wouldn’t hear of it, batting her hand at us and laughing. When we were halfway down the road home Mam had sent me running back, the dish balanced in my hands, to leave it by the door for her. I had forgotten Mam took me out that day. I have forgotten many of the good times.
My face pressed against the cold window, I search for the stars but find none. When Joyce was about twelve she’d roll out a rug in the back garden with her dad and crane her neck to the heavens while I watched from the kitchen. Sometimes she’d kick her legs in the air and laugh, and I knew he’d told a joke. Out there, together, they were in another world and I could see it as if through a film of water, but I never could break through and enter.
Once she splashed through, banged open the back door and called out to me. I was lying under the table, tracing the grains of wood. Her earth-smudged shoes appeared and I did see her, I did hear her say my name. But just like she and Pat had a world of laughter, I had my own silent one and I never invited her in. I didn’t want her to suffer the loneliness there. She waited. It must’ve been for a long time but eventually she went back outside. I think about that every day now.
If she’s at my mam’s, the old woman will be whispering lies and truths into my child’s ear while she sleeps, like she did to me.
I pull on my shoes and go downstairs. The hall is draughty, the air pinching my bare arms.
‘Leaving already?’ Kate’s voice echoes along the hall.
She’s sat on the bottom step of the stairs, her hair a sleepy fuzz. ‘Come into the kitchen with me.’
I follow her down a tiny wooden staircase and have to duck to avoid hitting my head on the beams above. The kitchen is small with a squashy sofa in one corner, an unlit stove and a green glass bottle on the windowsill.
‘Tea or a whiskey?’ Kate asks.
‘Whiskey.’
She lifts two tumblers from an oak press and rinses them in the sink.
‘How long have you lived here?’ I ask.
‘An age. Almost as long as you’ve been gone.’
‘Right.’
She pours two generous glasses.
There’s a rapping above. Someone’s knocking at the door. We wait for them to give up but the knocking continues and Kate gives me an anxious smile.
‘I’ll tell whoever it is I’ll ring the Guards if they don’t go,’ she says and leaves.
I pick up my whiskey and swallow. I strain to hear Kate but the walls and floors are too thick in this old place and silence rings around me. There’s an ache in my belly and I remember I’ve not eaten much, not since Mrs Lightly’s overcooked chicken. I open cupboards in search of biscuits, stumble only on cream crackers and inhale a few.
Behind me, the sound of someone clearing their throat. I turn slowly, a cracker suspended in front of my mouth, and there in the doorway is a grey-grizzled Kieran.
‘Well,’ Kate says from behind him. ‘A family reunion. I’ll make us a pot of tea.’
She widens her eyes at me, some secret message, but I can’t take it in and she glides towards the sink.
I should embrace him, but I can’t move.
He is frozen too. His skin is a cobweb of red veins and his bristly horse-hair has thinned like Dad’s did.
‘You’re back then,’ he says.
‘I am.’ I let out a breath, glad we’re saying something.
‘You came over from America.’
‘Canada.’
His eyes dart about the room, never resting on me.
‘I heard Mam is sick.’ I step towards him but stop just short.
‘She’ll not see you.’ He shoves his hands in his pockets.
‘It’s been twenty years.’
‘Did ye really think Mam would change her mind about you?’ Anger flicks at the corner of his mouth. ‘You’ll always be a traitor and a whore to her.’
The words cut me because I know he believes them too.
‘How is Mam?’ I say.
‘Holding on. Holding on. I’ll not stay long.’
‘You will stay for a sup of tea at least.’ Kate puts a teapot on the counter.
‘I’d rather a drop of something stronger.’ He perches his large frame on an armchair. For such a large
man, he’s almost dainty.
‘How did you know I was here?’ I ask.
‘Kate,’ he says.
‘I knew you’d not get in touch with him,’ she says to the tin of tea leaves. ‘So I went down to the pub this evening while you were still out and found him. He’s your brother. He deserves to see you.’
‘Sláinte.’ Kieran holds up his glass.
I answer with mine.
‘It’s a miracle to have the pair of you here,’ Kate says. She walks to Kieran and holds out her hand and he shyly gives her his. ‘I’ve missed this.’
Kieran empties his glass.
I knock mine back too and it stings my throat on the way down.
‘Tell us about yourself,’ Kate says.
‘There’s nothing to tell you.’
‘It’s been twenty years. Something’s happened.’
I try to say, I’ve abandoned and betrayed my husband and he’ll never forgive me. My child is missing. But the words are too heavy.
‘When did Inis get a phone?’ I ask.
‘A few years back,’ Kieran says.
‘I can’t picture technology there at all.’
‘But don’t you remember we had the radio?’
‘Who had it?’ I have remade my childhood the way I want to, cutting out what doesn’t fit.
‘The O’Flahertys.’
‘Jonjoe’s family?’
‘Aye.’
I never went to their home but still, people must have talked about it. I must have just tuned out what didn’t seem important for me.
‘What are you doing in Galway, Kieran?’ I say instead. ‘I never thought you’d leave the island.’