The Temple House Vanishing

by Rachel Donohue

The Orphan

  How did my story unfold? I have had ample time to think about this. My life is like a book, one that is read too early when you are not quite ready for the ideas it contains and you put it back on a shelf. All that remains is some sense of a theme. And a promise to yourself that you will try to read it again, some other time.

  Occasionally, I think my story was about shame and what it makes you do, both to others and to yourself. Then at other times I think it is about love and how it is a sickness. That love is a taking over of your being by something alien, someone else. It is a death of the person you were before. You do things you otherwise might not. You are not yourself.

  Or maybe that is obsession, a love unuttered. I can’t really tell which is which any more. Maybe there is no difference.

  I knew immediately I wouldn’t be coming back. I woke and saw the trees above my head at the top of the cliff; they were not bare and dark as they had been that December night but instead were full and luxuriant, with the fresh, almost luminous green of very early summer. The colour of hope, the colour that in the past had been a herald, falsely promising that this time my life would be different.

  The ground felt like it had melted and there was tall grass, a breeze blowing around me, and every now and then it would caress my hands and legs. I heard the waves against the rocks, and a bird, I think a cormorant, let out a mournful cry somewhere high above me. I remember thinking I finally wasn’t cold, and I had been cold from the day I had started at the school.

  I felt instead just right. It was a perfect moment of idleness. I could feel a fly on my arm, and the low hum of some bees. The earth underneath me was soft, deep and dark, and it was caving in slightly with my weight – not in a way that should alarm me, though. It was welcoming and, like Alice in Wonderland, I was being invited to fall into a new world where nothing seemed quite as it was any more. But I wasn’t scared. I owned it all, and this new world was there to be moulded and shaped. I might remember things, or not. I might create a completely different history, tell a different story.

  And I did that for a long time, until I couldn’t any more.

  There was no part of lying there that I wanted to change. I think that’s how I really knew I was gone. There was no restlessness, no desire, no need or want. Just me lying in the tall grass. I didn’t notice my blood, of course, or the odd angle of my head and how I was broken, every part of me. I didn’t see any of that. I’m sure that might have upset me or indeed someone else if they stumbled on to me. I might not have looked so peaceful then. But no one ever did find me.

  It stayed summer, gentle and warm, and it never got dark. I wondered about all the people who had died before me. I imagined them as a long and endless chain of bodies and I was holding their hands, the latest addition, and others would soon come to join me. We could have wound around the earth many times; there were more of us than the living. A not so mortal coil. But I couldn’t see any of them. I was just in the grass. There was no God, unless he was peace and sunshine. And I could actually believe in that. It made more sense than all the prayers and the penance, the words of which I no longer remembered.

  Memories came in and out of my head. They were neither good nor bad. Rolling down the hill in the field at the back of my parents’ house. The drive up to the school on that first September day; the black wrought-iron gates and the crunch of the gravel under the tyres, the beginning of the end.

  I made some things up too. It is Mr Lavelle who is with me in the forest that night. He came back. And we don’t walk to the edge of the cliff and he doesn’t strike me and I don’t fall. Instead he takes my hand and we fly like birds over the sea, high and distant, up to the moon. And I forgive his frailty and his words. And then I don’t. And I am on my own again.

  If I am honest I see it as a life of nothings. Very little happened to me. My life had been small. There was nothing to even regret. It had all unfolded as it was supposed to. And the search for meaning had ended here, in a place where even the concept of meaning could not be imagined.

  It seemed to me that perhaps living was the dream, the unreal fantasy. Or a long suicide, maybe, like Mr Lavelle had said. Something that would end. With some small highlights, things that were real. Like falling in love, although even that lasted only a short time. And it counted for little when you realized you were really part of eternity. Wind, light, air, sun, darkness, love, envy, and also hate. Death was the central story. Life was small in comparison. And in their own way, the nuns had probably tried to teach us that, but it had come out all wrong, twisted. They should have said, accept death, the endless nothingness of it, and then everything will be possible.

  Sometimes I would see Victoria as she was on the first day. Just a girl in love with irony and looking to be noticed. Like I had been. But then she grows a head like the devil and I have to turn away. Because she took things from me.

  I loved her but I never understood her.

  Victoria was right about one thing: there are ghosts. I came to understand that the dead have one choice left when it comes to the living; they can offer them absence or presence. And the world becomes divided between the people who are haunted and those who are not. It’s never their choice, it’s ours. You can pray in a church all you want, or summon the spirits in a graveyard at midnight – it will make no difference. You have either been chosen to witness the return or not.

  I left my parents to their grief and their guilt. I gave them my most complete absence and never went back to see how they coped. I set them free. To build something new, be something else. They didn’t have to see me in the shadows. And I knew nothing of what became of them.

  To Victoria and Mr Lavelle I gave presence. And without moving from the grass I let my mind find them whenever and wherever I wanted.

  Mr Lavelle in sunshine, wavering heat. A white shirt and his hand shading his face as he looks into the upturned eyes of a girl. He talks of illusion and an oasis. At night he can’t sleep in the hothouse of his white room, and instead he drinks and writes letters. Letters he never posts. And he watches the fan over his head and thinks about telling the police that he saw me that night, but then he is afraid and that takes over.

  It doesn’t last long, his sojourn in the desert. He reads poetry to people who can’t understand him, he tells them he is a painter, that he is chasing the light. Then he touches an arm and messes things up. He dies on a dusty road, a glance that went too far. They buried him outside the village.

  I was almost sorry for him then.

  Victoria I watched for twenty-five years. She was moving in a world that became less and less familiar to me. She was my ghost and I, over time, became hers.

  I watched her reading in the corner of the library in her new school, her chin in her hand, occasionally staring out the window; the school she went to after the doctors gave her pills. Or sitting at the back of a large amphitheatre with a man in a suit at the podium. She has piles of books in front of her and there is a boy beside her, tall and fair, a bit like Mr Lavelle. Every now and then, he writes something on her notebook and she smiles. I watched her on a train; I did not recognize the countryside that passed by the window. She was sunburnt and drinking beer from a plastic cup. There was laughter.

  Once she was in a beautiful cream lace dress, standing at the top of the stairs of her house. I think she wanted to cry but she bit her lip instead. I wanted to touch her veil, pull it back, in case it would help her see me, her broken, dead friend. She wrote me a letter that day and placed it in the jewellery box that she kept under her bed. The box that has my essays and photos in it. I don’t know what her letter said, I just heard her say my name out loud before locking the box. And she was scared, scared the way I had been that night, on the rocks in the dark. The night that I fell.

  She gets older and thinner. She stands at street lights in busy cities, she stares out the window of her office at the tail lights of the traffic in the morning, when it is still dark. She eats dinner with people she doesn�
��t like; women with downcast eyes paint her nails and when she gets her hair done she stares at herself in the mirror. The face that went to waste. She stands in front of people in dark suits and tells them what to think about something. They clap politely and take notes.

  She sits on a shaded terrace with a white hat on. Like the woman in the portrait that hung in her hallway. The light is blinding. A dark head bends and leaves food on the table in front of her. She is in Morocco, and she is waiting for him. But he never comes. Because he never really existed. Not as she wanted him to, anyway.

  And night falls, and she is always alone.

  She can’t sleep and drinks wine in her kitchen. Her head is bowed under spotlights and everything is shiny chrome and grey around her. She tries to be like everyone else but fails. She asks for forgiveness. And I can’t give it.

  She speaks of a journalist who wants to talk to her, talk about us. A journalist who has thought about me and seeks something of the truth, who wants to unearth our story, dig me up. Victoria cries out in the dark, saying this time she will. She will speak, she will atone and take the penance. It has been long enough. You can run from the consequence of your fate, run far even, but it will never cease its pursuit of you. You will falter, and it will be there, at your side, when you do. In weakness you will reach out, like a blind man in the dark.

  I have seen her turn her head at twilight on the street, convinced there is someone there, or just before she switches on the light in her hall. Some part of her sensing me, just out of sight. She is never quite quick enough to catch me. And I’m never clear if this is her tragedy, or mine.

  I think now my fear of being forgotten, of being eminently unmemorable, is what drove almost everything in our relationship. It was my weakness, my fatal flaw, and it turns out it was the strongest thing about me. The only thing about which I ever showed any resilience. Even now I want her to remember me. To be haunted. I push the limits of my watchfulness, invade her life to see if I can interrupt her, as she did me. It is both an act of hate and of love.

  Then she came back to the school. After all this time. I see her staring at the front steps, looking up. It is all boarded up and there are yellow ‘Danger’ signs, weeds in the garden and the yew trees have grown so close they are touching. The stained-glass windows of the Maiden’s Chamber are smashed. I wonder where all the students and the nuns went, the photos on the corridor to the church, all the girls caught in a moment in time. I imagine the pictures still hang there, covered in dust and forgotten in the empty house. And the cabinet of curiosities. I see the vine that grew around the door thick and strong, covering the empty glass case that had once looked as if it came from Versailles. And it covers nearly all the summer house now. Choking any of the ghosts that might remain there.

  Victoria did not come alone; there is a younger woman with her. Together they walk past the empty tennis courts and take the path to the woods, and then to the cliffs, which is covered in briars, overgrown now and never used. They pass under trees and over rocks, they hold back brambles and low-hanging branches. They stop and look lost for a while; the woman sits on a rock and holds her head in her hands and Victoria looks out to sea. Then they find the last of the broken steps, barely visible, that lead to the swimming hole. And the woman looks pale and turns away from the sea and the sky.

  They are coming to find me.

  As I wait for them to climb down, I know it means all that is past will now have to be revisited again. I will have to go back, observe no more but instead retrace my steps and the path that led me here.

  Victoria will need to face it too. No redemption. It is time for the fall. The scales need to balance. She is nearing the end. And it is right that it comes.

  I choose this fate for her.

  I open my eyes for what feels like the first time, again, just before she stands on the spot where she hit me. The waves crash below against the rocks and the sky is deep blue with clouds above my head. They are fluffy and white, like something a child would draw, and they race by, speeded up. In some ways time has passed and in other ways it hasn’t. Yesterday lives on, an endless circular loop of remembering and forgetting. There is no line into the future for me, and not for her any longer.

  I think how it is ironic that there should be darkness and light, even now. When she is old and her heart is sick. She has resolved so little, and is haunted by things that are no more. One love that never existed and another that did.

  And now there is nothing left of me. Just dust and some teeth, inside a skull.

  A fragment. Something for the cabinet of curiosities.

  Acknowledgements

  I’d like to thank Ivan Mulcahy, MMB Creative, for his belief and encouragement.

  Aoife Casby for her sensitive early reading and patient, insightful advice.

  The kind and wise at Corvus, in particular Sara O’Keeffe and Poppy Mostyn-Owen.

  Family, friends and colleagues who should have doubted but never seemed to.

  Ger, Ava and Charlotte for understanding I had to write this and making sacrifices so that I could.

  And Ciaran Carty for publishing my first short story.