For several seconds everything is blackness and gold, and it is almost impossible to focus, but then I nod my head, accept the outstretched hand and let myself be hauled back into the world.
Ruins
We’d spent three late-summer days touring the Beara Peninsula, using the Eccles Hotel in Glengarriff as our base, and even though the third night wrapped itself for a while in a froth of sea mist thick enough to obliterate detail, by six the rain had given way again to a soft grey light. Having kicked loose of the bed sheets, I lay before the opened window, feeling the coolness against my skin. Alongside me Mei slept soundlessly, curled into a loose foetal position, her face inches from mine and combed in shadow. I studied her as the minutes passed, every nerve ending heightened by the sensation of having her so near after so long, until finally she stirred, raised an arm and stretched, her body elongating so that her covering blanket spilt a little away. Her eyes flickered only momentarily open, and just when I’d begun to assume that she had slipped once more into sleep, she murmured something that I didn’t understand but which seemed intended as a kind of greeting, and lifted herself in cumbrous fashion across my chest. The morning seeped golden through the gape of the half-curtained window and split the far wall in two, and I tried with everything I had to believe that all of this was real, and that I was here, and alive, and happy. Then her eyes, the colour of a honeycomb’s core at that hour, opened wide again and this time fixed on some distant thought, maybe of all the sad mornings that lay ahead for us, after we’d once more taken up our separate fates.
She’d smiled the night before too, in a similarly sad manner, and suggested that there were worse ways to finish, but by then we’d already been over what could be said and when all is already lost it is natural to want to focus only on the contours and colours of the moment. Because of her head’s slight incline, most of her hair lay in black webs against the right side of her face, and for a few seconds, without meaning or wanting to, I became a camera, seeing us from somewhere beyond myself and charting everything from that remove. When she raised herself across me and turned a little towards the light I caught tears breaking, sometimes down her face, sometimes clear of her onto the pillow and onto me.
Then, all at once, just as her breath stiffened and the far back of her throat began to find some sound, less even a sound than a vibration, I was within the moment again, and I embraced her tightly. I held her in that way for as long as I could, feeling the bones of her face against mine, and whispering that I loved her, and always would. She looked at me with new intensity then, and as well as I thought I knew her I could also see the scale of her mystery. Her life, even after I’d been allowed inside, was all about walls, and the room she kept for me was exclusive to us but also confined to moments.
‘We’re together now,’ she whispered. ‘This is what we have. The world could end tomorrow.’
‘My world will end in six days,’ I said.
But at this she only sighed. ‘No it won’t. We’ll be sad, but even sad hearts go on beating. Even broken ones.’
The light against the wall waned and the sharpness of the morning was momentarily lost. She stirred when I whispered her name.
‘Mei?’
‘Hmm.’
‘Will you do something for me?’
She smiled. ‘What? Again?’
In that moment, in the mixture of light and shade, her face was relaxed, nestled among the chaos of her hair and with the efforts of our exertions still clinging as a gleam across her skin. Her mouth teased with whatever happiness she’d found, but only for a second. Then she looked hard at me.
‘What?’
‘Marry me,’ I said. I reached for her face, combed away loose strands of hair from in front of her eyes, then put the palm of my hand on her cheek. ‘You said it yourself. The past is gone and there’s only ever now. So, for now, for today, let’s marry.’
I waited only a few seconds for an answer that didn’t come, then scrambled from the bed. On the writing desk, amid the array of sightseeing leaflets, was a small notepad and hotel pen.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked, to my back. Laughter and uncertainty set her words to trembling.
‘Just an idea,’ I said, without turning. It didn’t feel quite clean to sit naked on the chair, so I stood there and started to write. Beyond the window and the main road, the sea was a shining veneer around the few thickly fo-liaged islets, calm as the scudded sky. Small boats hung from their anchors, and a trace of mountains water-coloured the distance along the horizon line. I quickly filled a page and a half, then picked up the pad, read in silence through what I’d scribbled, scratched out and corrected a word or phrase here and there, and finally, with care, tore out the pages.
‘The things I want to tell you,’ I explained, folding the paper crossways in two and then in two again. ‘And that I want you always to know. My vows.’
Her smile straightened but her stare didn’t falter. I stood in the middle of the room, thinking that I’d seen her in a few different beds during our broken time together, and I’d never come away unmarked from the melancholy of our aftermaths. Then she ran her hands back through her hair, gathered the blanket, straightened it out over her legs and waist and, without speaking, settled back down on her pillow and turned onto her side, away from me.
It was still early, not yet even seven o’clock, and silent again except for the hush of low waves a hundred yards away, and the occasional music of wrens nesting somewhere close. I’d expected her to drift back into sleep, but when I came out of the bathroom, fifteen or twenty minutes later, refreshed by the shower and drying my hair with a towel, she was sitting up again, with her legs tucked up beneath herself and her head and shoulders over the notepad. She didn’t look up, as usual not wanting to admit to having given in, and instead turned to a new page. I stood at the side of the bed and lay a kiss on the exposed side of her neck just beneath her right ear, which caused the world to smell all at once for me of tangerines. Held in place on one thigh, the notepad was flecked in smoothly scratched blue characters. Back when I’d been living in Taipei, I had learned to read a little of these in their printed form, mainly on road and building signs and in the daily newspaper headlines. Handwritten, though, they remained as obscure to me as code.
* * *
Until the previous February, we’d neither seen nor spoken to one another in twelve years, but there was not a day in all that time that I didn’t think about her. Through the first year after we’d parted, and for much of the second, I could hardly function apart from those hours I spent burrowing into whatever story I was trying to make sense of, as much for myself as for any potential reader. I lost weight and then piled it back on in the ugliest and most thickset of ways, drank to be able to sleep, and lived a gulf apart from other people. Some days, even breathing hurt like I’d been set alight. To fill the void I wrote, and whatever came out, fictional or otherwise, revolved around her, around keeping her alive and my agonies fresh. She was my compulsion, and I had nothing else worth saying. Some nights, hours deep inside a new story, I’d lose sight of the screen and be fogged by tears that, once started, came in gouts for long minutes at a time. Afterwards I’d sit there, like a dead tree in a wide field, all stillness and hanging limbs, and cling to the fact that feeling pain was at least still feeling.
If I’d been to war then I’d have written about that. Instead, the fifteen weeks that Mei and I had once shared became my eternity, down to the smallest detail. Leaning into afternoons in that tired Taipei apartment, blinded by the heat and sweating against one another’s skin, our bodies each aching to touch, and, once together, singing. Mornings in her uncle’s little walk-in restaurant, watching from my seat near the window while she moved among the tables in a short-sleeved cotton dress as glassy-white as seashells, pouring coffee and staring into a space that I tried with all my might to fill. And those evenings sightseeing the city, the bustling, spectacularly strange night markets, the wide-open plaza at Chiang Kai-
shek Memorial Hall, where lovers and families congregated to stroll in pairs and packs, and kids watched the soldiers bring down and fold away the flag. Or to the old Longshan Temple, the mood bloated with the stench of open fires and incense, where I cast fate stones while she stood bowing in front of great gold-painted statues of the gods she’d decided at that moment to believe in, just in case they did exist.
I’d known, I think, that a part of who she was had always consisted of some secret or connivance, but her confession, delivered one afternoon when she’d battled through a near-typhoon to spill torrents of herself on my apartment’s faded linoleum floor, couldn’t have split me open any more decisively with an axe. The second life that she revealed then was, in fact, her real life, and she stood there, beaten wet, talking through tears about the husband at home, a man the past two years crippled and left nearly mute by a deep cerebral haemorrhage. The marriage from the beginning had more to do with security than love, and he being twenty years her senior, long out of shape and not even handsome from a distance, the intimate moments were hard to bear, but until his illness he’d worked hard to make her happy, was always gentle and only ever full of kindness and respect. And for all of those reasons, he was the man she’d accepted in every sense as her other half, for better and for worse.
I hadn’t wanted to understand, but did. She was acting out of duty and the need to do what she believed was right. I sat on the side of my bed, unable to even look at her, and after the door was shut behind her there’d been nothing left for me to do but gather the shattered pieces of myself and return home.
In the years that followed, memories were all I had, and I scoured them for insight and lived with them and through them, even on those occasions when I’d find myself pressing the windows of a new romance. As people, we understand when the best has already been and gone, and all that remains to us are shadows. But we have to make the best of things. Mei was always my shadow, the one who loomed across my days and nights even when I was sharing them with someone else, making do with lesser love.
* * *
We reconnected through the Internet. In the time we’d been apart I’d continued to write, and if fame and wealth had succeeded in eluding me then I was at least still publishing, regular newspaper articles and book reviews, short stories at a slow but consistent pace for middling to decent literary magazines and journals, mostly in the States where there was still a fairly buoyant market for the type and length of stuff I tended to produce, and a novel or new collection every two or three years. I was filling days and passing time, and getting by as best I could.
‘You probably won’t remember me,’ she’d written, in an email that almost stopped my heart and which I read repeatedly over the next several hours, unable to quite believe what I was seeing. ‘But you and I were close friends once, in Taipei. The best friend I ever had. I think of you often, and it pleases me to see that you still write books, and I hope you are well, and happy.’
‘Of course I remember you,’ I wrote back, after a day spent shaping my reply, having edited anger down to bitterness and then to nearly unbearable truth, deciding that honesty could cost me nothing more than I’d already lost. ‘I remember every inch of you, and my heart is broken still because of it. But even though there were nights when thinking of all I’d lost made me want to die, I know that I’m so much better for having known you.’
‘I miss you, too,’ she replied, within minutes. ‘Night and day, I miss you, too.’ And on the next line: ‘Love, always.’ Unsigned, but a statement, as I chose to read it, of intent as well as fact.
Weeks of messages and grabbed calls followed then, making craters of the time in between, stripping my life once again of everything but us. I clung to my email account and barely slept, not wanting to live even a second in blindness to one of her responses. The eight hours of time difference didn’t matter because my body clock set itself as if I’d been waiting always for this chance, and within a couple of days, my hands shaking and my breath feeling like rocks in my throat, I was dialling the number she’d given me. ‘Wéi,’ she’d say, on answering the phone, yes as both an acknowledgement and a permission, her voice coming vague and distant and exactly as it had always sounded, even when she was against me, frail and full of air but also laced with all the things that didn’t belong in words. I took care not to push for details, and most of my questions hung unasked, afraid of breaking whatever spell we’d forged. She read my book every night, she said, the book I’d written before arriving in Taipei. My first, proud as I was of it, was a collection of short stories so separate from me by now, so belonging to my life before this life, that it hardly felt like mine at all any more. I’d left a copy with her, scrawling something either ridiculously formal or stupidly its opposite into the title page, kind regards, or happy reading; innocuous and anaemic words, perhaps, when there’d been such an opportunity to reveal myself, but a compromise that allowed her to justify my place on her bookshelf, or at her bedside. And shyly, it seemed to me, as if she were confessing to some sinful act, she admitted that not even one night had passed since my leaving without her picking up those stories and poring over a page or even just a few lines. She still read English slowly and badly but, after twelve years, had come to know their contents nearly by heart. I told her that I’d written other books since then, novels as well as collections, and some were better than others but all were better than that first one because they’d all, in their different ways, been shaped by her. But the book she had was good enough, she said, because it had allowed her to keep my voice in her head through all that time. And in her favourite stories, the saddest ones, every sentence I’d written sounded exactly like me. Hearing this made me happy, knowing that I’d been with her as much and as continuously as she’d been with me, but it also made me sad, because the years we’d lost, the time we’d wasted on loneliness, felt magnified.
Sometimes I’d put down the phone and start typing, and the words that came were like howls, full of all the things I’d wanted to say to her but couldn’t because the distance between us was still immense and the renewed link too tenuous. Such as how foolish I’d been, and how weak, to have let her indulge in doing the right thing at the cost of what we had going. Such as how, if I’d been any sort of man at all, I’d have shaken her into seeing sense, I’d have grabbed her and held on, and dragged her with me when I ran, damning the consequences, damning all voices of conscience and duty. We’d lost twelve years because she had put her crippled, brain-damaged husband’s greater needs ahead of her own happiness and mine too, and even though what we kept, each in our own tragic way, was still a love of sorts, it had been stretched too wide and punished too much with silence and lack of touch. Regret, we’d both come to realise, was a far greater burden to bear than guilt. Guilt hadn’t the permanence of regret, and could be kissed and laughed away. We’d have found healing through moments of simple ease: a walk in the woods or along the seashore, holding hands, speaking in murmured smiles and settling for the gentle reassurances of one another’s touch. That was the opportunity we’d had and not taken, and instead we came to understand the hard way that you indulge in guilt but live with regret, and it turns the taste of everything and makes you lonesome day and night.
* * *
By nine, we’d breakfasted and were on the road back to Cork. But there was no hurry.
Kealkill, a picturesque village tucked into the foot of a steep hillside roughly halfway between Bantry and the old monastic settlement of Gougane Barra, was quiet even for a Sunday, a pristine cluster of homes, shops and pubs. The morning felt ripe with promise, and a skin of translucent cloud draped the distance ahead, skirting the climbing sun. All along the roadside, flaming blooms of lupin, sea aster, bindweed and dog rose gave the morning a rare brilliance.
The stone circle was signposted, and the car took the hill slowly, straining in places against the incline. We picked our steps along the high part of the first field, keeping to where the earth had been sculpted in
to ruts by tractor wheels and blanched from weeks of wind and dry weather. Then, after coming through a gap in the ditch, the stones rose up ahead of us: two of them, side by side, the smaller of the pair taller than the height of a man with his arms raised, the larger probably half that height again; and to their left, as we cleared a brow in the land, five flat-faced stones of varying size laid out with meticulous care in a snug ten-foot circle.
On the drive out, Mei had listened while I talked of the place’s importance to our earliest people and the mystical quality of the circles in marking out sacred locations for the ancients, and she watched the road from the passenger seat and made small sounds of understanding while sunlight jabbed between the branches of the roadside trees and lit her face in staccato bolts. But nothing I’d said came close to the feeling of actually standing here, catching from those great schist slabs that strange sense of a time out of time, the kind of unyielding permanence that makes death seem superficial. There was such a holiness about this place, one that tuned itself to deepest, oldest magic, and I could see its effect on Mei, in the slow way she moved and the distance in her eyes when she rested her hands on one of the stones; and I could feel it in myself.
We walked among the stones, trying to concentrate on the thrum of the earth alive beneath us, and took turns at feeling small in a few photographs, pressing ourselves one at a time in against the taller of the monoliths and laughing for the camera. And within the circle, time stopped. The green hills ahead of us wore layers of themselves into the distance, and Bantry Bay lay off to the west of us, a cobalt spread folded in between the slants of land and the huge deepening sky.
All playfulness ceased, and I took her in my arms. As we came together I felt her whisper something, some reflex thought shaped in her own language, but it broke in two against my mouth, went unfinished and was lost. Later, when I mentioned it, wanting to know what it was that she’d started to say and what it meant, she either didn’t understand what I was asking or had no recollection of having spoken at all. Even though it probably wasn’t anything important, merely an expression of the view’s beauty or the idyll of the moment, for some reason losing those words bothered me and left me with a feeling of disquiet. But in the circle, then, with her that close, the two of us breathing and tasting of one another, words hardly mattered. When we drew apart, she smiled and lowered her eyes, and I kept my arms around her and told her what I wanted.
The Boatman and Other Stories Page 3