by Molly Aitken
He bought a new camera and took pictures, and when he got them developed we laughed at the ferocious black-haired creature he’d frozen in them. I didn’t know you were meant to smile in photos.
In one of his diners we ate frozen cream and I’d never tasted anything so delicious in all my life. It sent shivers all through me. Pat laughed at how I vanished it and ordered us two more in different flavours. I told him I would be happy to eat ice cream for every meal.
We took a bus north and I threw up again and again, and had to get out at every stop to breathe. Each town was the same, sun-drenched with square buildings all together in neat lines. They didn’t seem natural. I slept too and woke surprised to find my head on his shoulder.
We stopped in Montreal and Pat got us a room in a motel with pink flowers printed on the curtains. I’d slept so long on the bus, I sat awake by the window with nothing outside to look at.
I could leave but I didn’t know where to go or how to live alone. I was in the place I’d always hoped to reach, America, or what he kept telling me was now Canada, but this country was so much larger than I’d ever imagined. I didn’t fit here and I didn’t know how to survive on my own. I was a wife now.
I sat beside him and quickly, without thinking, I pressed my mouth to his. We were married and I wanted to wipe out the past. Are you sure? he whispered, but his voice was already muffled in my hair. I could say no, I could, but I nodded. I was a wife. I remembered Mam sobbing and I didn’t want to be like her. I wanted to be like Aislinn. I gritted my teeth. We undressed before I could think, and he gently kissed my face. He kissed me down my body and I couldn’t move, and then he kissed me down there, making shocks of fear and pleasure, making me want to cry, and he stopped and it was worse. While he was in me, I felt like I would throw up, but I swallowed it down. After, he wrapped his arm around me and told me we should’ve waited and I felt my anger at him down low, in my belly. I wouldn’t do it again.
In the morning we went early to catch another bus but he stopped first at a shop and picked us up two sugary buns with holes in the middle. While we ate them at the stop, I asked him, ‘Why was it you married me?’
He coughed and his adam’s apple bounced as he swallowed his mouthful.
‘I liked you and everyone knew it,’ I said. ‘But you didn’t like me.’
‘I did like you,’ he said. ‘But I always think every little thing through, sometimes so much that I end up never acting at all. The first impulsive thing I ever did was buy my ticket to Ireland. I used most of the money my dad left me, which most people would say was a bad decision. But with you, I can’t explain. It wasn’t an impulse but more like a need.’
The bus pulled up in front of us. He didn’t move to get our bags so I reached out for them.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I want to explain it right to you. I felt like I needed to take you away from there.’
I looked down at him on the bench and felt oddly tall for once, but he didn’t glance up.
‘I’m sorry about last night,’ he said.
I picked up my bag and went to stand behind the other people getting on. He stood behind me.
‘And you’re also pretty,’ he said, ‘and funny, and I knew my mother would never like you.’
We arrived in his city, Ottawa, and she was waiting for us on the porch of a big white house with windows all along the bottom and the top. She looked like a doll. Not one of those cheap plastic ones but a tiny one made for a tiny house with a tag around the neck that said ‘housekeeper’. She wore a stiff grey suit-dress and a face to match.
‘Michael,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you were coming today.’
He laughed. ‘You knew.’ He was carrying his bags and I stood beside him with my little sack slung over my shoulder.
He kissed her on the cheek and she beamed but her smile fell away when she looked down at me.
‘And you are the new wife,’ she said. ‘Well, she’s very young and short, Michael.’
‘This is Oona. Oona, my mother, Joyce.’
‘Mrs Lightly,’ she corrected.
‘Good to be meeting you,’ I said.
She sighed. I followed her into the giant hallway.
‘Is it just you who lives here?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Michael’s father died twelve years ago.’
‘Sorry.’
‘You’ll be staying upstairs. Are you hungry? I’ll get you something. Blueberry pie? Coffee?’
‘I’ve never had blueberry pie. We had coffee in the city. It was awful. Do you have tea?’
‘No.’
She gave Pat a look of disbelief. They towered above me but I could still see their faces. He was grinning like a fool, without a notion of what she was thinking, all her judgement. I wanted to hit the pair of them.
‘I’ll drop the bags upstairs,’ Pat said, and left the old woman and me alone. She coughed. She had to be at least fifty but she was as straight as a stalk of rye and her face as smooth as Mam’s. No. I’d told myself not to think of her, not to think of the past. I’d have to teach myself better.
Mrs Lightly shuffled past so as to avoid touching me and strode away down the hall. I sniffed my armpit; a little overripe but not that bad. I wasn’t catching. I stomped into the big room and found it stuffed with dark, sharp-edged, shiny furniture. Above the fireplace there were photos in cold silver frames. Most were of a light-haired, smiling boy. In the best one the boy looked about ten and was sat on a shore by water, laughing up at the photographer. I stroked his little face.
Behind it was another picture of a grown woman. She was half turned away and had round glasses pushed into her short yellow hair. She was beautiful, laughing too.
Mrs Lightly marched in with a tray stacked with cups and slices of what I guessed was pie.
‘Is she Michael’s sister?’ I asked, pointing at the woman with the glasses.
‘No. I only had one child,’ she said. ‘Michael,’ she added, as if I had no sense at all.
‘Who’s this then?’
‘Sally was Michael’s fiancée three years ago.’ Mrs Lightly’s grey-green eyes were pinned to me.
‘What happened to her?’
‘It was a car accident. Terrible.’
My feet itched to run but I had nowhere to run to.
* * *
Pat’s room was too hot. I sat on the bed and waited for him. It was still early but I had complained of illness so I could get away from Mrs Lightly.
Unlike the other rooms, Pat’s was almost bare of furniture. Just a bed, a press, a shelf full of books, and a honey-coloured rocking chair in one corner. I pulled the chair into the middle of the room and sat on it. It shaped against my body to hold me, smooth as a pebble.
There was a knock.
‘Are you sick again?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me.’ I gently rocked.
‘It’s all new to you.’ He lingered at the open door.
‘Come in,’ I said. ‘It’s your room.’
‘It’s yours now too.’ He walked to the dresser and lifted a brush. ‘We won’t be here long. I’ll get us our own home.’
‘That’ll be grand. This is such a big house, but it’s not a home.’
‘I guess not.’
‘I’m going to read those books.’ I pointed at his shelf. ‘I’ll finally be able to put Enda’s teaching to use. We only had the Bible at home, and a few others I stole from school.’
‘Tell my mother that. About the Bible, not the stealing. She loves that book.’ He pulled a thick one off the shelf. ‘Herman Melville. My favourite when I was a boy.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘A whale.’
I sank onto the bed beside him. ‘I know a story about a whale.’
‘I bet it’s a good one.’
‘It is.’
‘Michael!’ Mrs Lightly’s voice cut between us.
‘I’ll go down,’ he said.
* * *
Three weeks
of almost nothing whipped away from me. I found some books on Mrs Lightly’s shelves that told me about the country, its cities and people. All the words I didn’t know I skipped, but I soaked in enough to make me thrill at the thought of living somewhere so vast and unexplored. One book said you could walk for days among trees and never see another person. One day soon I would leave and breathe in the forest air.
Pat went back to his job running the family furniture factory. He was saving money so we could buy our own house. I said I’d go out to find a job myself but Mrs Lightly sighed. ‘You can’t work. What would people think?’
Sometimes she reminded me a lot of Mam.
When I told Pat I wanted to work, he scratched his head. ‘I know it’s boring for you . . . but I don’t know what you could do here.’
‘What about a shop? Or I can always dig. I’m good at farming.’
He laughed.
‘I’m used to always doing, Pat.’
‘Why don’t you help my mother?’
‘She doesn’t want my help. You don’t cook like I do. Everything I know doesn’t make sense here.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He did look sorry, but he never found me a job.
Some days I enjoyed the ease of doing nothing, but my legs began to ache with the lack of moving. I went walking one day, past many, many houses, and found the city. It was smaller than New York, and much less exciting. I went into a huge shop with clothes hung everywhere. I flicked through them, overwhelmed. I found a short yellow dress that would swing just above the knees. It was the kind of outfit I’d always imagined I would wear when I worked as a secretary with Kate. I walked up to a woman with her hair fluffed up on top of her head and asked her to hold it for me while I went home to get money. She sniffed and said, ‘We don’t hold onto our stock. If it’s still here when you come back, you can buy it.’ She gave me a look like she didn’t expect I would be able to afford it. I had been planning to ask her if they had any jobs going, but swallowed my question. I never went back there and stayed inside Mrs Lightly’s more and more.
Pat’s book made me ill. It was impossible to make the words stay still. When I could focus, I found Ahab’s whale was nothing like the island whale, or the mother who washed up on our shores; but the men were like the ones I knew, ready to slice a creature apart.
* * *
I was sick when I woke up.
Breakfast was tasteless white bread and pink jam, or jelly, as Mrs Lightly said.
She took me to her doctor, who poked inside me with cold fingers and asked me about my last bleeding. I told him it was about seven weeks ago.
‘I thought so. I’m happy to tell you you’re pregnant,’ he said.
‘But how?’
He blushed, and explained quickly to me what he meant.
I counted in my head from when Pat and I were at the motel, got four and a bit.
I thought back further, but my mind blocked me.
When I came out of the doctor’s room I couldn’t stop the shakes and Mrs Lightly rubbed my back.
‘Silly child,’ she said. ‘I wondered why he married you. I should have known.’
‘If I’m pregnant,’ I said, ‘I can’t leave here.’
‘And where would you have gone? Come on.’
She held my hand as we walked out into the street, where cars screamed past and children shouted, and somewhere far away a baby was crying.
* * *
Mam told me island women sometimes died giving birth, usually as a punishment for some sin, but even when I told Pat this the notion of becoming a father burst new life into him. He bought diapers and bibs and a big dress for me. I didn’t wear it until my Dublin clothes wouldn’t fit me.
Birth was as unknown and terrifying to me as Éag when I was small. All I had was my tiny sister falling out of Mam’s dress and the stories of my birth and Aislinn pushing out Felim on the beach.
‘How was it when Michael came out of you?’ I asked Mrs Lightly one morning.
‘I don’t want to remember it.’ She didn’t meet my eyes. ‘After Michael, I decided no more children.’
‘You can stop it?’ I said. ‘But how?’
She walked out of the room. She was the worst person I ever knew for holding a conversation. And there was no Aislinn here to ask these kinds of questions, or even Enda. It was just me, and I didn’t know anything about this kind of life. I wanted to cry but when I tried nothing came out.
* * *
I was stretching, lengthening, pulling. My body was no longer mine. It was a boat carrying a child to shore.
Mrs Lightly told me a woman with a child in her belly cannot work. Pat grimaced at me but nodded. I told them where I came from women worked until the day the baby came out. She gave him her look above my head.
I woke with the sun every day and while they were still asleep I left the house and walked to the edge of the town and into the woods. They were my first trees and they sang to me. Branches creaked in strong winds. Leaves kissed noisily. The sounds reminded me of the sea.
This was what I had dreamed America would be. I walked through the trees, going deeper and deeper each morning, saw leaves catch fire as the weather turned cold and the flames fall to the ground and die. I woke one day to find the ground solid, pressed my fingers to it and the bitterness shot through me and snapped under my feet. It was hard to walk but moving absorbed my concentration. Next came the ice-rain that needled my face and hands, and after was the snow that made the trees shiver and drop white dust on my head.
With white roofs outside we ate Mrs Lightly’s meals of chewy meat, sliced bread, mushy carrots. I offered to help, told her I was good at making a tasty fish supper, but she said it was hard to get fish this far inland. How far am I from the sea? I said to her. Her answers changed every time I asked and I realised she’d never seen the sea.
Pat came home one day with a pomegranate. At the door he knocked the snow off his boots and approached me where I was sat on the lowest step of the stairs, stroking a swollen belly. Instead of taking off his icicled coat, he pulled the blushing fruit out of his pocket, brandishing it like a prize, like it was the medicine that would cure his sick wife. The shine and hope of his eyes, the pure faith he held in the fruit, in its miraculousness, made me smile at him and eat it when he sliced it open.
It tasted like the sweetest, most holy food, and while the juice was still on my tongue he kissed me tenderly. That night, I let go and I was no longer thought but feeling. I curled against him like a seed and fell deep asleep, waking late in an empty bed, just me, and the baby, leaping about inside me.
When the girl was a small child, her mother whispered stories about the underworld, telling her it was a land of golden fields and magical orchards.
As the girl stepped off the boat she was shocked to find it barren, bare rocks mantled by an inky sky. The flowers piercing the broken soil were red and when she plucked them they wilted in her hand. In her new house that she was meant to call home, it was always night and there was no moon to light her kitchen. She could not sleep and sometimes on the knife-sharp wind she heard the screams of tortured souls. Her mother’s lullabies were gone and she had never felt so alone.
The Island
My shoes are thick against the rough island road and I can’t feel the stones beneath. The rain comes down so heavily it’s hard to see beyond the low wall in front of me. The ferry is lashed to a new quay, all bulky concrete.
It’s twenty years since I’ve been here but the island is the same. There are no trees, not one. Just low rolling green slashed by the knitwork of stone walls. I keep walking, leaving a fork in the road behind, but I know this is not the way home. The land should be rising and instead it’s falling again.
The waves splash in a haze of quickening darkness and the rocky land slips down to the sea. I had forgotten how the sky stretches here, rippling with clouds that race towards the Clare mountains, north to Connemara and beyond, to the ice and winter of my New World.
I f
ind the back roads and keep my head down every time I pass a cottage. The windows reflect black like empty caves. I can’t see in but they can see out. I want to stop the stories from being spun but I can’t. They’ll be on the lookout for me because Joyce, with her bright young face and questions, will have started the whispering already. I can’t help glancing up at them, wondering if Joyce is inside.
I walk along the coast road and ahead a boy of about twelve is splayed on the back of a tractor with a collie on his lap. His blue eyes rove over me, but in a lazy way like he’s only mildly curious to see yet another tourist. The driver in a hat, who has to be his dad, slows the tractor as they come to a gate. The boy jumps down, dog bounding at his heels. He grins at me and there is something of Enda’s spark at the curl of his mouth. My fist rises to my chest.
‘Are you looking for the wreck?’ he calls to me in English.
‘I am,’ I say as I gain on them.
The man barely glances at me and I don’t recognise him. I pass them, smile and glance at the boy again. He’s opening the gate and the man drives the tractor through.
‘You’ll find her just over the rise,’ he calls. ‘Can’t miss it.’
‘Thanks,’ I shout back.
I didn’t need anyone to tell me where the boat wrecked and Pat shot through the night to be delivered to me like a damp present. Would he have changed his mind, not married me if he knew everything that would come later? All the trouble I’d bring?
The wreck is huge. A rusted orange metal carcass, hollow and gigantic. It reminds me of the whale, but every part of her was used. She lit our lamps with her oil. Filled bellies for weeks with meat. Her bones fashioned needles so we could clothe ourselves. She nourished us like a mother until the harvest came and she was no longer needed. But the metal of a ship could never be sawn away with the tools the men had, and what would they have used it for anyway?