The Boatman and Other Stories

by Billy O'Callaghan

  After some time the man, Nick, approaches from the upriver direction, but she is so engrossed by the water that she doesn’t notice until he is beside her. When he reaches out and touches her shoulder she looks up, not at all startled, shielding her eyes with one hand against the sunlight. He smiles hello but she just stares. He is in his blue shirt, with the collar unbuttoned and the sleeves rolled to his elbows, and the grey jacket of his suit is draped over one forearm.

  ‘I’m glad you came.’ he says.

  ‘You asked me to. And I said I would.’

  ‘I know. Well, anyway. I’m glad.’

  She nods, squinting against the glare of the sun, then picks up her book from the bench beside her and sets it down on her right side, a gesture he reads as an invitation to sit. For a moment it feels awkward. She hasn’t shifted an inch from the centre of the bench, and while there is plenty of room for him, their positions suggest an undeniable intimacy. He lays his suit jacket over the bench’s armrest, and leans back.

  ‘This is nice,’ he says, trying with his voice to express some state of relaxation that he doesn’t quite feel.

  ‘Hmm. It is.’

  ‘And there’s real heat in the day. They’re saying we could be in for a good summer.’ He smiles. ‘Those ducks look to be enjoying themselves.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Well, I don’t. I just mean, they look to be.’

  She turns to him. ‘For all you know, this is how ducks always act. For all you know, they could be in mourning. Or contemplating suicide.’

  ‘Well, yeah. I suppose so. I mean, it’s possible. Anything is possible.’

  ‘That’s not true, either. I can think of plenty of things that are not possible.’

  ‘It’s just a figure of speech.’

  He sees her lips tighten and tuck in at the corners, opening dimples.

  ‘Why are you always so placating? Your wife must hate that about you.’ She considers him, her tone calm, detached. ‘Seriously, do you think that’s an attractive quality in a man? Do you think that’s what women like? Or want? Or need?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I haven’t thought about it. I don’t do it for those reasons. I don’t do it for any reason. It’s just who I am. I want to be supportive.’

  ‘And you think a few inane words about ducks, or peddling your little clichéd figures of speech will cure all ills? Is that how little I’m worth?’

  ‘I’m only trying to help.’

  ‘Who asked for help?’ She hasn’t raised her voice and nothing about her hints at upset, but a fleck of froth clings to the corner of her mouth. She must feel it because she reaches for it with the tip of her tongue, misses and finally wipes it away with the tip of her thumb. ‘What are you even doing here, anyway? You should be with your wife. Why did you even ask to meet me here?’

  ‘I have good memories of this spot, this bench.’ He clears his throat. ‘My wife and I used to come and sit here. It’s a good place for lovers, and the long grass is nice for children. There are always grasshoppers in the long grass on warm days.’

  Her response is to draw away again. The small family of ducks, a green-necked mallard, a tawny second and a few scuttling chicks, slip in casual diagonals from bank to bank.

  ‘Odd little creatures,’ she says. ‘Don’t you think? They look to be at such peace. But they’re not. They’re swimming. They have to work to stay afloat.’

  From the inside pocket of his jacket, Nick draws out a small brown envelope. He looks at the side of her face, and the sweep of her neck and her bare shoulder, then opens the envelope, withdraws a small bundle of photographs and starts to slowly shuffle his way through them. She steals a glance, and when he doesn’t react, leans in.

  ‘What are those?’

  ‘Photographs.’

  ‘I know that. Christ. What do you think I am?’

  He sighs. ‘No. I’m sorry.’

  ‘And there. Again.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Placating. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of you. All the time, sorry this, sorry that.’

  ‘Well, what would you prefer? Anger? Violence?’

  She stares at him, a grin or grimace showing. ‘Why can’t you say something you actually mean? Something truthful, just for once. At least that’d be real.’

  Nick meets her eyes, his temper fraying.

  ‘How would you know what’s real? How would you even recognise it?’

  ‘I’d recognise it. Real would be me lying down there in that river until my lungs started to burn and just opening my mouth and letting it all in. What else would you call that, if not real?’

  The first photograph is a close-up shot of a child, a boy of three or four, laughing directly into the camera’s eye. Studying the picture causes Nick’s frame to slacken. He sighs deeply, then after a second or two steels himself and holds up the picture.

  ‘I want you to look at this.’

  In response, she turns her face in the direction of the water.

  ‘Lucy!’

  She flinches. Her name strikes like a hand to the face. But her composure returns almost immediately, and she considers the photo and after a few seconds accepts it into her hands, holding it as if afraid it will come apart at her touch. But once it is before her she can’t ignore it. She brings it closer.

  ‘He has your eyes,’ she murmurs.

  ‘And your mouth.’

  ‘Such a smile,’ she says, smiling herself. ‘So handsome.’

  ‘He’d be seven today. Richard. The sweetest boy. Such a smile is right. All kinds of sunshine. We named him after your father.’

  ‘Richard,’ she repeats, beneath her breath. Then her mouth tightens, and she begins to chew on the meat of her lower lip.

  ‘I remember coming out of the hospital,’ Nick says. ‘The morning he was born. It was as bright as this, and as warm. I remember it as if it were yesterday.’

  ‘Time does play its tricks, doesn’t it?’

  ‘You’d been in labour fifteen hours. I called your folks with the news and my heart was beating so fast I almost couldn’t speak. And I came and sat right here on this very bench, just watching the river and the butterflies and bees, and listening to the grasshoppers and the sounds of the park. Trying to regain some focus. When I returned to the hospital, you had him at your breast, our son, and for weeks after we’d looked at one another with the same kind of astonishment, with awe for what we’d created, what miracle.’

  ‘No,’ she says, still transfixed by the photograph. ‘Don’t call him that. Miracles give credit to God.’

  Nick looks at her, not quite understanding.

  ‘If we credit God for the good then doesn’t that also make Him accountable for the bad? For all the horror?’

  ‘I don’t know. Life happens. It’s not about blame. Can you remember anything at all from that night?’

  In response, she reaches for her book and considers the cover creased nearly to ruin, a lurid science-fictional fusion of oranges and reds with a name once embossed in some brighter colour, white or silver, long since rubbed away from having passed through so many hands. ‘Imagine,’ she says, speaking seemingly to herself, ‘if there’s not life out there. Think about how terribly lonesome knowing that would make us. It would be almost unbearable.’

  ‘Lucy. Will you at least try? The night. Tell me what you remember.’

  With the same steadiness, she hands him back the photo, pushing it away from herself. And she closes her eyes.

  ‘Can you please stop talking? Please?’

  She opens her eyes again, meeting his.

  ‘Lucy, we have to face this.’

  ‘No, we don’t,’ she says, and all at once her expression falters. ‘We don’t have to do anything. We can just sit here in the sunshine and watch the ducks. And stop calling me Lucy, okay? I’m not who you think I am or who you want me to be. Enough with the names. I’m nobody. Not any more. Can’t you get that into your head? I’m nothing. I’m not alive, I�
��m not dead. I’m nothing.’

  ‘And is that what you think he’d want? What happened was the stuff of nightmares. Children aren’t supposed to die. And yet it happens every day. And there was a night, two and a half years ago, when it happened to us.’

  ‘Christ. Go back to placating.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I asked you to please stop talking. Just shut up and let me sit here. Let me have the sun, and the peace and quiet.’

  He knows that she is trying to hold the pieces of herself together, and for a minute or more he says nothing. He looks again at the photographs in his hands and bunches them together, bringing neatness and resolve to their corners.

  ‘This isn’t going to work,’ he says. ‘I can’t keep doing it.’

  ‘Who asked you to?’ Nothing shows on her face, not a single crease of emotion. Her eyes regard the river as if it is something to be read.

  ‘Do you feel nothing?’ he asks. ‘Are you so closed off that not even his photo can get to you? Because if that’s true then there’s no hope. All really is lost.’

  ‘It is,’ she says, with something like pity in her voice. ‘And it’s been lost a long time. You’re the only one who couldn’t see it.’

  She reaches for his hand then, lays their palms flat to one another, hers on top, and knits their fingers together. They sit that way for a while, each caught in their own trap of thoughts, until she raises his hand, turns it over and begins kissing his knuckles. The fact that he is still wearing his wedding ring brings a hint of a smile to her mouth but it hardly shapes itself before dropping away, and she releases her grip on him, gets to her feet, picks up her book and walks off, keeping to the path that follows the flow of the river downstream. From the bench he watches her go, until she is lost to one of the tree-lined bends, and he is left alone.

  Fine Feathers

  Every morning, since back when summer first began to turn, our garden is visited by a pair of magpies. The room I use as an office is at the back of our house, on the ground floor, and my desk sits beside a large west-facing window looking out onto a sloping, well-managed garden, with the open land beyond framed by distant hills. I have long since learned that, if I am ever to get anything worthwhile done, routine is essential, and so by seven I’ll be in my chair, even on weekends, with a mug of hot tea at my elbow and the scribble-filled pages of whatever manuscript I am working on spread out before me.

  The sight of birds lifts my heart. It’s difficult to explain, even to myself, and when I’ve tried to speak of it with Jennifer I have always come up short. It has to do with their colours and how, even among the flower beds, they bloom in ways entirely their own. When grounded, a bird’s life seems to jolt between one state and the other, shuffling in small stabs between points of utter stillness, a strictly pendulum existence with each end of the swing distinct in and of itself. Such simplification appeals to me at least as much as their elegance in flight.

  I’d been putting out bread and seeds for the smaller ones, the finches, robins and blue tits, and then these black-and-white pests began showing up and devouring whatever crumbs I had spread across the lawn. My initial instinct was to chase them away because I had them down in my mind as filthy carrion, disease-ridden scavengers. I used to feel the same about crows, until I thought about it and understood that we all need to live, even the ugliest of us. And until I took to actually seeing them.

  The first few times I opened the window to startle them into flight, but by the fourth or fifth sighting I found myself actually anticipating their arrival. Up close, they are such beautiful creatures, not really black and white at all, or not just those stark shades, but possessed of a far more subtle iridescence. The pair that visit my garden are mates. It’s not even about affection between them, though there are demonstrations of that, in certain small ways. Their bond is revealed by how comfortable they are together, and how wholly accepting they are of that. And my observance is limited to what they elect to reveal. It might be my garden, but that entitlement stretches only so far. These birds inhabit their own dimension, but they are united in doing so. Sometimes, one will perch on a fence or tree limb while the other forages among the shrubs at the far end of the garden, but even when apart they still seem somehow connected, as if they are seeing from the same eyes, feeling the trembling of the air through the same set of feathers.

  Birds don’t have it easy, but at least their reasons for dread are more defined. Predators, hunger and the cold. Reducing existence to that makes a black-and-whiteness of life and death. In some ways, people aren’t so different, though of course in others we’re leagues apart. We lack their sense of unity.

  Usually, if Jennifer and I are returning from somewhere together after an evening out, at the theatre, say, or for dinner or drinks with friends, I’ll use my door key. Though she has mislaid hers probably no more than three or four times in the six years that we’ve been living in this house as man and wife, she can never seem to put a hand on it when she needs to, and there’s always such a rigmarole of rummaging through handbag and coat pockets that it’s just easier for me to be the one who lets us in. On summer nights this is not an issue, and sometimes I am even content to stand and wait while she goes through her motions, but if it’s cold or if there’s rain or sleet in the air, or the threat of snow, as there is tonight, it doesn’t do to linger. The ritual is that, while her fingers continue to fumble through her clothes and other hiding places, I’ll unlock the door and step back so that she can enter first. The gentlemanly thing to do. Good manners. Also, making sure that she’d be first in the firing line were we ever to disturb an armed intruder. I’ve chanced this gag more than once, unable to resist, it being the thing to say that comes so easily to mind, and she laughs, the same way each time, a little croak that rises from no greater depth than the back of her mouth, and slaps a hand against my chest with the same feigned annoyance, leaving me to wonder whether she is playing along out of duty or because she has become so tuned out to my quips that their originality or otherwise no longer even properly registers.

  Tonight, though, we’re past games. I get out of the car with my key already in hand, and I open the door and go straight through into the kitchen, abandoning her to fend for herself, a challenge to which she has proven more than capable. The line of questioning that I’d started in the car hangs between us. Not the first words I’d thrown at her during our drive back, but the first in the last three or four miles, since before we’d escaped the town limits. There’s just something about driving at night on country roads, even roads you’ve come to know well, that encourages introspection. The tightness of them, and how close they bring you to danger in the darkness, with their sudden bends and their unwillingness to accommodate anything more than moderate speed. A hard, distracted swerve would put us in a ditch, or into one of the low walls or, worse yet, a tree, if I were to line us up just right.

  We’re sponges, really. We soak up everything that happens, everything that’s said and done and everything we see and hear, and we hold it in our hearts. And that can be a lot to bear. Ignorance is too often the better and easier bliss. Details barely registered in the moment have this peculiar and disquieting way of resonating later on, and to live again when we set our minds back on them, each a colour or a brushstroke, however minimal, in the portrait or landscape that we paint.

  Opening the door and coming through the hallway is one of those moments that lives on. I’ve held the sensation of the house’s warmth in my face, and also the chill of the outer night against my neck and the back of my head. I carry one along with me, in my wake, even as I plunge into the other. Maybe this moment remains so vivid among all the details of the evening because it captures the whole business in microcosm: desperate suddenly for the sanctity of home, traversing the chasm between what’s gone and what awaits, a headlong charge into the fiery future and a bitter reminder of how frozen everything within the past has become.

  Even the things we can’t rightfully know remain
inside us once we learn of them. Maybe those, most of all. We supply the details. The mind’s eye fashions the worst possible scenarios and outcomes into lurid being. Nothing can heighten reality like the imagination. And in our heads, in this situation, we spare ourselves nothing. The suffering of it becomes our drug, our high, and we wallow in the torment.

  ‘Stop asking that,’ she’d said, her voice from the passenger seat close to tears as I’d taken us up the final stretch of road towards our home. ‘If you keep on, I’ll tell you. But if I do, you’ll want to die.’

  I have that moment in me too, but for all that pain, all the tidal visions that accompany her words, there is still, despite everything, the thrilling sensation of having her there beside me, she the all-time beauty to my eyes, trembling inside a dress far too light, low-cut and bare-armed for this weather and this time of year but perfect for a party and the heat of a crowded living room, and for parading before hungry eyes. Silk, of a shade of red that at this hour is just another shadow. Like blood in a black-and-white movie. I held on to what she said and just drove, teeth clenched and barely breathing, keeping the heat of my thoughts, the inferno of them, concealed and my stare nailed to the twenty or thirty yards of road lit by the low spill of our headlights.

  Considering it now, I can see how turning my back on her in the hallway might seem symbolic. But leaving her to, as I say, fend for herself, feels like the more apt symbol this night. She looks vulnerable, a slim collage of straights and angles, skin fine as frosting, with a pallor that absorbs the surrounding shades. Ethereal is the word I want, or at least the closest I can think of to fit my needs. But looks can so wickedly deceive. She is all the things I’ve listed, but not just them. Those fine bones are hard as tree limbs, and that delicacy is a trap, a lure. Of course, I know I’m not blameless in what has happened, because I saw only what I wanted to see, and it could be argued, if she were of a mind to do so, that in this way I’d pushed us towards our brink. But misreading is easy when the signs are leading you on, and it’s human nature to project, and to fall in love with fantasies. We’re all guilty of that, I think, which is why we probably deserve the pain that revelation brings. We set ourselves up for the drop, and fair is a place where they judge pigs and pumpkins. When it comes right down to it, I’d asked to be deceived, or had at least enabled her in her treachery, though there can be no question either that she wore her mask well. And now I am left with the pieces of a broken life.