A Country of Eternal Light

by Darby Harn

  I should be out there, at the cemetery. In my ending. Why did I come. You know why. I have a start in me yet. I have love yet. So much love. A drowning love. An apocalyptic, fierce love. I’d find those birds on the rocks and I’d bring home to Da to fix. Fix ‘em, Da. And he couldn’t and I’d weep, like I did when it was him there dying and I’d pour myself into the drink just to find a container for all this feeling. I poured all my love into you. Bottomless you were. A reservoir for oceans of love. And I’ve still love in me yet.

  Hope.

  “I’ve upset you,” he says.

  “It’s nothing you’ve done.”

  He lights another cigarette, Zaim. “Are you sure you don’t want one? It will give you something to do with your hands.”

  “Hand it over.”

  He lights a new one on the end of his. “Besseha.”

  I cough a bit. “Sláinte. She was from here? Your wife?”

  “Italy, in fact. We each knew only a little English. I knew no Italian. Here we were in a place beyond language. This is a place only of heart. Love. You are blessed to have been born of this place. You are born into a love most will never know.” He takes a long drag off his smoke. “We hold on, so hard, to their memory. Their sound. Their smell. And the more we remember… the farther away we get from the truth of them. Who they were in truth is gone and dies with every memory. I came back to remember, but now I must forget.”

  “Forget?”

  “It’s only when we truly let them go that we may find them. I struggled with this for a long time. I found her. I want to be found. I want to go out to the beach, and be found again.”

  Mo leanbh. Mo stór.

  “I sit and I wait… do you know?”

  “Oui.”

  “I’ve been waiting, for so long… and he doesn’t come.”

  Zaim nods, like he understands. “May I tell you something?”

  “You’re drunk, anyways.”

  “Oui, yes.” He looks around the patio. “This is life. Here. And this is death. Together. Connected. We look at the world, and we see lines on a map. But there are no lines. Life and death are countries, but there are no lines. We live in hope. We also live in grief. In death. They are here. We don’t see them because we think we are some place else, but there is no other place but where you are.”

  The waitress floats from one table to another like a bee, bzzz, bzzz, bzzz. So young. Martin Garret’s girl.

  “They’re serving bacon,” Zaim says. “The last bacon.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  He looks up, Zaim, in consideration. “What was the line, in Synge? Early on, when talks about the flour and bacon.”

  “‘If anything happened to America.’”

  “‘If anything happened to America…’ Oui. Have you heard the latest? They passed the law, outlawing pregnancies. Millions of women marched in protest all over the United States. There were riots. Fighting. It was surreal, to see women die for the right to bear children who are doomed to die themselves.”

  Ash rains on my pants. “Women died?”

  “Many.”

  Da said there were always two Americas. The America of the world, and the world of America. The former opened its arms to the tired and poor. It liberated Europe from its own madness. The latter chased land to the ocean, and swept away an entire race of people in the process. Here at the end, in the twilight of humanity, everyone lives in the world of America, gone from a shining city on a hill to the fiery cap of a waking volcano.

  “Mothers should die for their children,” I say.

  “‘If anything happened to America.’” He smiles, and gestures to his cheeks. “Back to fish, and poor skin.”

  “An tús,” I say.

  “Oui. Back to the beginning.”

  I never read Sygne’s book until I had gone to New York and was sore for home, though it has always been around. A constant signifier of our existence. Same with The Man of Aran, playing non-stop in the museum in Kilbanna. So many accounts of the lives we live. So many souls come here to discover a way back to something they themselves have lost and in doing so exiled us.

  The waitress buzzes through the patio again. I can taste that bacon. The salt. The tongue of flesh it forms in my mouth as it curls under the roof of my mouth. The suckle of fat, soft, pliant, wonderful like the brim of Gavin’s lip.

  A woman walks past our table. Her eyes linger on Zaim, and then on me, trying to figure us. She goes inside but she must be in the window because Zaim does this little waive.

  “I think you’ve an admirer,” I say.

  “I have several.”

  “Go on with yourself.”

  He laughs. “They flatter me.”

  “You may as well enjoy yourself. Everyone else is.”

  Zaim shrugs. “I come here to end.”

  “I thought the end was the beginning.”

  “Here I rediscover her. Us. The shape of my life.”

  These bleeding cat ears won’t stay up. “You don’t think… you don’t think you could meet someone else? And be happy with them, for a little while, at least?”

  “Perhaps,” he says.

  “Maybe they can make the hard parts easier.”

  “Perhaps, yes.”

  “It’s not what you want.”

  “This is my story,” he says. “This is my choice. I forget my life and perhaps I will be remembered, on the shore.”

  The accordion fills in the gap in conversation again. Waves break across the island, against the cliffs. This blunt punch, knocking the wind out of the island with every breath.

  Zaim clears his throat. “What do you want, Mairead?”

  My only start was you. I ended with you, but here I am. There is nowhere for me to go to rediscover you. I go to the shore, as I’ve done since I was a girl, and you’re not there. I can’t close the circle.

  Aoife stumbles up on the deck. Lord God. Tits bulging out her halter. “Meow,” she says, and kisses my cheek.

  “You’ll ruin my make-up.”

  She snorts and kisses me on the lips.

  “Don’t start, Aoife.”

  Aoife thumbs the lipstick off me. “Oops.”

  “You out on the piss already?”

  “We’re going to show these old gits how it’s done. One last time, yeah? You and me. Like it was. Who’s this?”

  “Zaim,” I say, leaving the table. “Slán.”

  He nods to me. “Slán go fóill.”

  Aoife hooks my arm with hers. “Picking up another man, Mairead. You’ve got yours. Leave some for the rest of us.”

  “Don’t be daft. And I’m not drinking. You hear me? I’ve got to get Ma back, besides. Have you seen Gavin?”

  “Your man said he’d be a little behind.”

  “What have you been talking to him for?”

  “He took a fall down the pier. I patched him up.”

  The bottom goes out of my chest, and my head reels back to that moment Colm sat me down in the living room and told me what I already knew. “He fell?”

  “Not very handy, if I had to say. Or… is he?”

  This woman. She never left puberty. She dangles in front of me like she’s on strings, this dopey grin on her face.

  “Ah, it’s good to see you out. It’s good seeing you well.”

  I don’t know what I’m doing here. I told him I’d come and I shouldn’t have come. Everyone on the island will be here.

  The children.

  My cat ears droop down. She straightens them out. “There you are. Look at you. Absolutely fucking state of the art.”

  “I’m not staying long,” I say.

  She pulls me along. “C’mon.”

  “Wait, who’s looking after the home?”

  “Saidbh.”

  We both laugh.

  Vampire nuns lurk next to zombie fisherman, straw men and a robot like, made up of cardboard boxes and cut up litre bottles. No one says a word. Dozens sit at the candle lit tables throughout the pub, silent i
n their society. At the bar, they pass their drink requests in scraps of paper. The only sound the flutter of the curtains.

  Iris falls into line at the bar with the other old timers, their cheer in seeing her not diminished in silence and her joy – this joy, where has it been – is not either. I don’t think she ever came out for one of these my entire life, and here she is the life of the party.

  Such as it is.

  People cluster in front of the fireplace, hogging the heat. An empty table forms the axis of the room, frosted cake and grilled fish and steamed cabbage heaped in its center. A feast like I’ve not seen in ages. How long has it been since I’ve had a proper meal. Plates and silverware set out for four, but no one sits at this table.

  This is the table for the dead.

  In France, during the Reign of Terror, they would have these macabre balls. Bals des victimes. You had to be a relative of someone who died at the guillotine. The women would tie these red ribbons around their necks. And Ring a-ring o' roses. ‘A-tishoo!, a-tishoo!’ That started during the Black Death. People would walk around with posies in their pockets, because of the smell. People make light of darkness. Death a game. A show. A lullaby. If children can laugh at death, then what fear is death? We all fall down.

  The candle on our table struggles. The wick short. The people across from us play a pulse-racing game of hearts. A father, a daughter and a son, in a baby seat.

  Aoife drinks. And drinks. And drinks. I do not.

  Gavin comes in. He does a ruddy job going to the bar first, and then just naturally arriving to my table.

  “Hi – ”

  I put my finger to my lips. He squints in confusion as I pass him the pen and notepad they left on each of the tables.

  ???

  I take the pen. No one can talk. Until midnight.

  He pokes me in the shoulder.

  Don’t start.

  He flicks my hand. I make little cat paws and it’s so quick with him. Instinctual. Lord God. They’re gawking at us.

  He takes the pen. It’s hard not being able to talk.

  You’ll talk to anyone.

  ?

  Were you going to tell me you fell?

  Gavin looks at me, confused. Everyone is confused. The curl in their noses. Their pens scribing like mad. What must they be writing. I see she’s over it, then. Moving on, her.

  Gavin writes again. What’s wrong?

  I write nothing in reply. We sit a long time. The silence like pressure in my ears. Aoife stews, like she’d rather it was just us girls and Gavin sips at his whiskey. I don’t know what I thought coming here. I felt this stir in me for something else and I won’t even look at him. Everyone is looking at us. When they find my eyes they’ve something on their mobile. No one is talking and we’ve been talking for days, Gavin and I. His voice like a breakwater against all these thoughts and you’re out there alone and

  They should have set out a highchair.

  I hunt through the pub for one. They all look as I do. What’s she going to do, the woman out there on the rocks? The statue. The gargoyle. Mad with grief, her. In the back by the toilets I find a high chair. Like they hid it from me. I stab it down at the table for the dead. I go back to the table. The clink of glass the only sound. Aoife slinks away to the loo. We’re showing them now, aren’t we, Aoife? Ma doesn’t notice any of it, lost in the company of the silent chorus at the bar. Gavin acts like he doesn’t recognize me. How can he.

  He takes the notebook. Let’s go.

  There’s no leaving.

  Gavin drifts over to the bar. The men he bagged sand with the other morning down the pier. Pats on the back. Incomprehensible gestures and muffled laughter. They hang on each other and he is linked in arms going around the bar. He finishes his whiskey and he puts it back and it’s full again and the air is full in here. I track down Ma. Let’s go. Come on, woman. She makes this noise in complaint and everyone is looking now. Gavin comes over. He puts his arm around me, pulling me in close like he does in the dark or out in our anonymity and he whispers drunk.

  Stay.

  Someone’s got trouble with the latch to the stall in the loo. Aoife teeters out to the mirror, thumbing her nose.

  “Christ, Aoife.”

  She stuffs the bag of coke away in her bra. “Want some?”

  “You’ll be keeping your nose clean when you’re on duty.”

  She snorts. “It is just like old times. I’m still telling you to loosen up, and you’re still telling me what to do.”

  “Lord God, woman. If you were any more loose I’d be carrying around a wrench.”

  She touches up her lipstick. Fuck’s sake, Irish girls and make-up. We slather loads of it on without any sense of its application. She looks like a bleeding drag queen.

  Look at me.

  My makeup running away. I’ve gone dark. I brush away what’s left of my whiskers with the back of my sleeve and I make it worse. Ash Wednesday all over my face. And still. I don’t know who this is, looking back at me. Naked with power. Confidence. Vitality. And yet wasted to bone. Bruised with rain. Pale as the day.

  She snorts again. “You even told me what to wear. Do you know? You just made me yours. And then you left.”

  “There’s no talking to you.”

  Aoife saunters up behind me. Bloodshot eyes staring into mine in the mirror. Her breath hot on my neck.

  “Even with all that shit on your face, you’ve a bit of a glow about you, Mairead. I’d say you look flushed.”

  “I don’t know what you’re sore about,” I say.

  Her voice hushes to a whisper. “I’m always sore for you.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “What is it, then? Are you worried they'll see youse together, or that they'll see you're happy?”

  I dig that bag of snow out her bra. We fight over it into the stall and the bag tears apart between us. Aoife goes to her her knees, trying to catch the falling snow with her tongue.

  “You happy now, Aoife?”

  Aoife grabs at me. She pulls at my pants and her hands are under my blouse and her tongue is my mouth and she’s kissing me. Her damp, quivering palms cradle my face. Her lips linger on mine, as they did when we were girls, practicing.

  “Aoife…”

  Someone else comes in. A scarecrow, like. She goes right back out. Aoife peels off me. Checks herself in the mirror. Straightens her tits. Wipes the coke off her nose, and she’s as ever.

  “Someone should be happy,” she says, and leaves me.

  The wind dials me southwards on the crate. I scratch the grit out of my eyes. Domnhall Walsh’s horse and cart rests at the stile. No mourners on the road. Just a few men in the mist, carrying a body through the beach grass. The ground they shovel becomes shrapnel. The rain and waves make mud of their work. The dog jitters bashfully in place as I come up to them. Colm plants his eyes in the ground with his shovel.

  “Who is it?” I say.

  “We found him on the beach,” Gavin says, and I pull back the tarp. The blue canvas curls back over Zaim’s face.

  I stagger back through confused grass. Gavin my shadow to the grave. I go back to your photos and shells and little boats. Gavin reduces to a human sliver in the turmoil of rain, sand and spray in the cemetery. The men lower the body into the grave, welling quick with water.

  Pebbles of hail skitter across the rock. Bullet my skin. Beach grass tenses with the cold, as if frozen with memory. The angry wind snaps them clean, and makes arrows of the blades.

  Here I am.

  The ground crunches beneath his feet. He brushes away the snow melting in my ear. Kisses my red, numb lobes. He palms the snow into a ball he mashes against my cheek.

  “This is perfect snow for a fight…”

  “He never saw snow.”

  Gavin dusts his hands. Red. Calloused. “I don’t know if it’s safe out here right now, Mairead.”

  “When is it ever?”

  The snow piles on our silence.

  He sinks to
his knees next to me. Head bowed, like he’s waiting for the chop. “You should come in.”

  “I’ll just sit on my own a while.”

  “I’ll leave the door unlocked.”

  “I’ll be at the home tonight,” I say.

  He shoots up. “Yeah, ok. Um… are you here tomorrow?”

  “I’m here everyday.”

  The day goes without him and then at dusk he comes. The air heavy between us on the way home, filling the grikes, the pits in the road, the crack in the front door.

  A cloudy, bloodshot iris floats in the gap. “Don’t say it.”

  “Ma, go inside.”

  “Like a cat you are, always bringing home dead birds.”

  “Get yourself indoors, woman.”

  The door creeps shut. Gavin laughs, a little. “You ok?”

  I stand in the door. “You’ll be leaving now.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

  “You’ll be leaving.”

  He doesn’t know what to say. What could he say, without sounding selfish.

  “I’ve done something wrong, I know, but…”

  “You’ve been gentle,” I say. “You’ve been kind. It’s a good thing you’re doing for your Da. Now do it, and go home.”

  “Don’t. Don’t do this.”

  “I don’t want anything more in my life.”

  “I do.” That shame in him again. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m being clumsy, I know… I just don’t know what to do.”

  “Go home, while you can.”

  “This is my place.”

  “I don’t love you.”

  He reduces in front of my eyes. “Mairead…”

  “I don’t want you. Don’t come around anymore.”

  He just stands there. Man of stone. All his words dying for breath. Go on. Go and live. There’s no living here. He leaves down the road. The dog runs off to his wander, the opposite way.

  Chapter Eleven

  I give Ma some shite tea. The sun room of the home drumming with rain. She sees me in my scrubs and her eyes brim with recognition. She slams her fist against the arm of her chair.