by Molly Aitken
The new house was wooden, and if it had stood next to Mrs Lightly’s it would’ve looked like a child’s, but I still felt like a pebble rattling around inside it. I was used to just three rooms and this had eight: four on the bottom and four on top. There was what Pat called a porch at the front. He painted it blue. We were far from the noise of the local town, a good hour’s walk, and the house was so surrounded by trees a person walking along the road wouldn’t know we were there. I loved the rush of wind through thousands of leaves, the rattle of branches and thuds of the forest. It reminded me of the never-ending sighs and breath of the sea, the grating suck and slosh of stones along a shore.
There was no wall or fence to make a boundary between the wild and our house, so the trees invaded the garden with brambles and shade. Pat hacked at the thorny bushes, tearing his skin, but no matter how much he cut it just grew back thicker. Wilting leaves were walked into the kitchen and we burned fallen branches on the fire.
When Joyce saw the place, she squealed and bounced in my lap until I let her out to totter after a butterfly. I smiled at Pat.
‘It’s better than I hoped,’ I told him.
He grinned and I saw in his tired, happy blue eyes how difficult it’d been to find it. He found himself an office job and arranged for all the furniture to arrive before us. He had smoothed our road into the future to make life easy for us.
I made the garden thick with herbs: rosemary, green lace and mint, just like Aislinn’s had been. I stole bushes from the roadside or the edge of the woods to begin my little patch: a sturdy thyme, a blackish parsley. I kept them in pots in the kitchen through the winter, pouring lukewarm water on them to keep them alive.
Joyce toddled about helping me, carrying weeds to the weed pile and bringing me my trowel. Sometimes I would set her digging her own patch too, where we planted primroses, purple clover and white flowers that burst open one day with a heady sweet scent. They were gone a week later. Just a memory.
In the warmer months Pat and I sat out on the porch and drank tea and talked. He told me all about his life before. His father who he almost never saw but who smelled like soap and sweat and Marlboro cigarettes. His schoolfriends and the ball games he played. How he clung to his friends because he had no brothers and sisters. It hit me then just how far apart our lives were, but I had entered his and I would try to fit in. Late one evening, when I was thinking about turning in, he told me about her, the beautiful woman from the photograph, Sally. She was a smart one. They had been together since school. He stopped, and couldn’t go on.
I told him stories too, but mostly I listened, wanting to soak in everything about him, about our new life.
Our first summer in the new house came to an end but we clung to the edges of it, wrapped in a blanket on the garden seat.
‘Do you think she’s like me?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘Joyce. Is she like me?’ He was gazing up at the stars. How could he just look up at the stars?
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘You don’t look that similar.’
‘I think she has the pointed Lightly nose, don’t you?’
I stood, the blanket crumpling to the ground.
‘I’m going to bed.’
‘All right,’ he said.
In the bathroom I poured a bath and lay under the cold surface. I wanted the cold to numb me but it was like knives. I still missed the raging sea and the high open sky. I was hemmed in by treetops and ice and mountains.
I had planted potatoes along with some other seeds a man in the town sold me: carrots, cabbage, beans. Beans were the hardest. If the frost did not get them the wind did, snapping them so often that in the end I gave up.
‘You could just buy them at the shop,’ Pat said.
‘I need to do something,’ I told him.
He built himself a shed where he made chairs, a table and Joyce’s bed. He made me a carved chestnut box for my sewing.
It was rare to get fish and fish was what I knew. I could gut and fillet a mackerel in seconds. String it, salt it, dry it and a hundred others in a morning. In the town there was meat: thick and red and bloody. The first slab Pat brought home sat on the table while I walked around it, taking in its different angles. I salted it and fried it with onions and boiled some potatoes. Pat’s chin ducked down to his neck at his first bite, which told me it was bad.
Every morning I worried about the mail. I hadn’t put my new address on the letter I’d sent to Enda, so Mrs Lightly would have to send anything on to me; but every morning there was only mail for Pat.
The working-Pat spent most of his time at the office, only coming home to eat and play with Joyce. To him she jabbered, but with me she was silent, thoughtful. She dashed about, demanding of him ‘Watch me roll’ or ‘Food. Cake. Sweetie’. Somehow she must have sensed I watched her. She still ran to me and wrapped her arms around my legs, clinging on as if afraid I’d vanish if she let go. Sometimes when she climbed into my lap I wept into her bright hair and she would whisper that she loved me.
As Joyce grew, I was afraid to look too closely at her face. Afraid of whose nose, whose island smile, whose wrinkled brow would show there.
At night, Pat and I slept without touching. He wasn’t angry. He somehow knew I was afraid of his touch, of any touch, and some days he stayed later at the office and I guessed there was someone there who was able to touch him. Sometimes I woke screaming with the ocean blocking my throat. Sometimes I woke aching down below and I’d run from the house and stand in the cold night until it stopped, until the sickening feeling of the longing and the need was gone.
The Cold Bed
‘We have to talk about this,’ Pat said.
We were finishing a lunch of egg sandwiches and potato soup. He often drove back from work to eat with us.
‘What is it? Why?’ I said, grabbing a plate.
‘I’m not done,’ Joyce cried.
I dropped it back in front of her and he lifted her onto his lap.
There were no more late evenings on the porch. He worked. I sewed rainbows of little dresses, tended the garden and scrubbed the house from top to bottom. I still dreamed of getting a job in the town but the years had rolled on, and although I walked into a few shops I never knew what to say or how to behave. I couldn’t shake the memory of the woman in the clothes store in the city who had laughed at me. When Joyce was still small she needed me, but now she had started school and my days were often empty. I tried not to understand my mam but I did. A part of myself was missing whenever Joyce was gone. The girl who sat staring out the window of the cottage imagining her life across the sea would have been ashamed I hadn’t made more of reaching the New World. My recent freedom felt like a burden, the days stretching out ahead of me with nothing to fill them.
‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ Pat said.
‘I don’t want to talk about it. I’m busy.’ I snatched a basket by the back door and marched out and stood without knowing what I was going to do. If he had fallen in love with some woman, I didn’t want to hear about it. I didn’t know what Joyce and I would do without him, but I couldn’t stop him. He might be happier with her. Weeds. That was what I needed to do. I tugged them from the ground, uprooting even the most stubborn.
A few minutes later the car groaned away and Joyce came snuffling outside.
‘What is it, Joyce?’
‘Nothing.’ She hopped from foot to foot. ‘My shoulders hurt.’
* * *
In the kitchen I peeled the dead skin off her sunburned shoulders.
‘Mommy,’ she said. ‘Why do you talk different than everyone else? You sound funny.’
‘It’s my accent. I’m not from Canada.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Ireland.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Far away.’
‘People at school say you’re a witch and kill dogs.’
‘Huh. When I was a girl I knew a woman who everyone said w
as a bit of a witch, although I don’t think that word was ever used.’
‘You knew a witch? A real one?’
‘She did give my mother a potion once.’
‘What was your mom like?’
‘She was the real witch. Now, how are your shoulders feeling?’
She peered at each one. ‘A bit better.’
‘Have you been liking school?’ I said.
Joyce shrugged and I realised I’d never asked her this before. A whole year gone by and I never asked.
‘I like it,’ she said in her adult way. ‘Did you like school when you were my age?’
‘When I was your age I didn’t go to school. Now that’s enough questions. Let’s go outside.’
She slid off the chair and faced me, blue eyes wide. ‘You don’t love Daddy, do you?’
‘Why would you say that?’
‘You don’t sleep in the same bed. Most parents sleep in the same bed.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘My friends at school said.’
‘What did they tell you?’
Like a bird she tilted her straw head to one side, a lopsided child scarecrow with flaking radish shoulders.
‘What else did they tell you . . . about parents?’
She nibbled her lip. ‘Oh, nothing much. Is that why Daddy was angry with you this morning?’
‘No,’ I said.
She peered up at me, blue eyes seeing too much.
She spun on her heel and ran outside, hair streaming, shoulders blazing.
When she’d disappeared into the trees, I yelled after her to come back but I didn’t really want her to. I didn’t want to see myself reflected so clearly.
* * *
At dinner Pat asked after our day. Joyce prodded her potato and said it was fine. He asked how her shoulders had got burned, why wasn’t she wearing a t-shirt and hat? He didn’t need to look at me.
I left as he was washing up and went up to the bathroom, where I filled the entire bath.
I lay there steaming, but my mind wouldn’t stop; like the sun, Joyce had got under my skin, stopping me from floating through our life without feeling, without changing. The heat wasn’t enough.
When I came out with soggy feet Pat stopped me in the hall.
‘What?’ I asked, dizzy from the scalding water. ‘You look like you’re angry with me.’
His forehead was creased up like a newly ploughed field. For the first time in our marriage he looked old.
‘Can we talk?’ he said.
‘All right.’
* * *
In the garden, I knelt in a patch of mint and listened. Joyce’s bedroom window was open and her light, Canadian voice floated down to me. She was telling Pat a story about a wolf who nursed two boys.
I knelt there until I heard his tread on the back of the porch. I stood up and wiped my cheeks.
‘I’m sorry, Pat,’ I said. ‘I know I’m hard to be around but, please, don’t leave Joyce. She needs you.’
‘I wasn’t going to leave,’ he said.
‘If you are staying, there’s nothing more we need to talk about.’
‘Oona, please.’
‘No. It’s all right. I don’t blame you. I don’t.’ I strode towards the woods, briars dragging at my jeans.
‘Wait, Oona. I haven’t done anything.’ He caught up to me. ‘If you would just talk to me.’
‘I don’t want to talk.’ I dodged a bush and stepped under the cover of the trees. ‘Just leave me alone, Pat.’
And he did. He walked back to the house, and we were quiet for days, but he stayed.
The girl woke in her husband’s arms and saw a sun rise over the horizon of the underworld. For the first time since she left her mother, she had slept. She felt rejuvenated, and starving.
She sat with her husband and watched the bony karst landscape painted gold. In the distance trees grew, and so they packed rucksacks and put on their shoes and walked towards the forest. Soon they reached grassy meadows bobbing with flowers and humming with bees. The air was sweet and warm and moist. The first trees they reached were weighed down with so many fruit, blushing in the dappled morning light. She reached up and brushed a heavy plum with her fingertips. Her mouth watered.
There was a rustle in the grass, the flick of a black tail.
‘Just an adder,’ her husband said, smiling his long white teeth. ‘Eat.’
She plucked the fruit and burst it with her bite.
The Fisherman
‘Oona?’
I turn and Etain is jogging up the road towards me; the thatch of the house blazes gold behind her, a reminder that she is my parents’ daughter now.
‘You can stay at my mother’s old place,’ she pants. ‘I still have a bit of straw in the hearth and I’ll bring you blankets.’
‘I’m going to Éag,’ I say.
She looks up at the sky and shakes her head. ‘No one will row over now. A storm’s coming.’
A snappy wind has blown most of the clouds away and the sea is shimmering blue.
‘It looks fine to me.’
‘You really have been gone a long time.’ She smiles and I want to hit her. ‘Don’t be angry at your mam,’ she continues. ‘I know she seems bitter, but the years have been hard on her, and with your brother Enda. Well, it nearly killed her when we heard the news of him.’
‘What news do you mean?’ I ask. ‘That he was a homosexual?’
She has the decency to blush. ‘No,’ she says. ‘When he died. Your mam was afraid of you coming. She worried about you over the years.’
‘I’m sure she did.’
‘She loves you. She just doesn’t know how to show it.’
‘Why do you put up with her, Etain? Your mother was so free. She always said the truth.’
‘Aislinn was a coward and selfish. Her own children weren’t good enough to live for.’
I moan, and the fierce, motherless girl doesn’t seem to hear.
‘She didn’t stay for me,’ Etain continues. ‘Mary has been good to me since I was a little girl.’
She is so sure and certain, sturdier in herself than I ever saw Aislinn.
‘What about your brother?’ I say.
‘Hah.’ She bounces up on her toes, nods at me. ‘He left too.’
I watch her leave, someone I will never know, walking back along the road.
She turns once to shout, ‘I’ll leave you blankets at my mother’s, just in case.’
I race to the pier. A man with a cap pulled low on his head is stacking lobster pots and I call to him and he waves.
‘I need to get to Éag,’ I gasp as I get close to him. ‘Is there a boat? Do you know someone who can take me?’
‘You won’t go today.’ He pulls his grey hat off and his hair is light. ‘There’s a storm on her way. Stick out your tongue and you’ll taste her.’
‘Please. Take me over quickly now, before it comes.’
‘You’re the second person in two days who wanted to go there. But no one will bring you, Oona. Any boat will be wrecked.’
Fresh green eyes in a round but now lined face.
‘Jonjoe!’
He laughs. ‘You got there in the end.’
‘Is there really no way you can take me?’
‘I’d like to for you, I really would, but it’s not worth my life. There’s the family to think of and I always fancied being buried on Éag, not under the waves. Come to me early in the morning, and if the storm’s blown herself out I’ll get a few lads to row you.’
‘Thank you, Jonjoe.’ I grasp his hand and he blushes.
‘Better not.’ He smiles and gently pulls his hand away. ‘The wife’s got eyes in the back of her head.’
* * *
I walk the north of the island where there are no villages or cottages, not even a shelter for the cows. My path is along the cliffs. The sky is heavy with cloud and dark with wind and rain, and no matter how closely I look out across the waves I can’t see Éag.
>
I think of Enda and the lake. I went to the cabin to wipe it all away, to sink and forget, but I couldn’t. I thought I wasn’t as brave as Aislinn. I told myself Pat would be happier with someone else; Joyce was grown and didn’t need me. I had betrayed them both and it would be better for them if I was gone, but I couldn’t. I needed, need them too much.
Aislinn’s cottage is just ahead of me, clutching close to the cliff. Tears roll off me. The rocks are uneven beneath my thick hiking boots and when I fall it’s because I’ve not been looking where I’m going. I focus on the pain of my bleeding hands and watch my feet as the rain cuts in from the waves and drenches me.
Inside Aislinn’s old cottage the fire has been lit and there’s a stack of blankets. The roof is still there, despite its blackened state from the fire all those years back, but it sags and drips and there are countless holes. I wrap the blankets around me and sit close to the flames, watching. The storm lashes through the holes in the roof. There are so few roofs on Éag to shelter Joyce and the only person who lives there is a fairy’s son.
* * *
I wake and my child’s father is looking down at me.
In the Forest
Joyce and I sat on the back porch that summer. I sewed clothes and cushion covers with the off-cuts.
I watched her lying in the grass, waving her legs that had grown so long. She was shooting away from me like a sapling reaching up for the sky.
It was hot and she dozed off on the porch after dinner. I carried her into the house. I was small but so was she for a six-year-old.
‘Where’ve you been?’ Pat hissed from the shadows of the hall.
‘Quiet,’ I said. ‘Joyce is sleeping.’
When he was asleep beside me I remembered the meadow, pressing my fingers across my breasts and stomach, tending and smoothing the thrum between my legs, stopping in shame, only to begin again until I shook and wept in relief.
* * *
I walked through the trees to watch the first green buds sprout on a branch and unfurl into the sunny green of summer, then catch fire while the nuts dropped from their shells and all became blanketed in the pure softness of winter. Sometimes I would sit Joyce on my coat and escape up a tree. It was a new thing, tree climbing. Hand over hand, up and up, until I could go no higher. I perched on the edge of the world, between rippling leaves and heaven. I pulled cold air into me and let it expand out inside my body that bent with the springy green of the saplings, my belly hollowed out with the height, with the sky, with the corners of freedom. I was back on the cliffs of home. And I forgot.