“It’s the apple-tree man,” he could hear the children whisper. “It’s the madman. It’s the ghost.”
And Gerald did feel ghostlike, as if he might well disappear. He thought of his mother at seventeen, who almost died with him in her womb, brought back to life by the bite of an apple, a fairy tale in reverse. He thought that if only he could persuade his sapling to take root, then the tenants would cease their angry simmering, then the rain would stop, then the winds would die down and he would no longer hear the screaming.
One night, after a visit from another local landowner, Gerald got lost. His guest had drunk his way through most of Gerald’s wine cellar and had complained all night about taxes and tenants, and Gerald had been desperately, desperately bored. Not entirely sober himself, he picked up his sapling (the branches drooping now, the buds shut tight, the bark growing dull) and set off across the bog in the middle of the night in search of the right spot to plant his orchard.
He had walked for almost an hour in the near-dark of the cloudy sky, under relentless drizzle and through never-ending mud, when he saw the light. A wink, a glimmer, like laughter up ahead. When he ran to the spot, the light appeared to blink out, then reappear farther away. Gerald followed it. It danced and twinkled, flitting like an insect, a flickering candle, and Gerald, encumbered with his apple tree, turned his ankles on rocks and stumbled over hillocks, splashed through mud and puddles deeper and deeper into the bog. Then the light went out and did not appear again.
Gerald took another step and the firm ground beneath him gave way to wet, sucking mud. It rose around his ankles, pulling him down, and the more he thrashed and tried to run, the more he sank. Thigh-deep in the bog hole, Gerald cried out, knowing full well there’d be nobody to hear him but the ancient bodies buried under the turf. The wind screamed as he shouted louder, trying to drown him out. For hours Gerald struggled, the sapling thrown to the grassy rocks too far for him to reach, his strength waning, his voice fading, the darkness his only constant.
Then he saw the girl, candle in hand. He’d heard the chambermaids talking about banshees: the howling women, the ones with bone combs and ashen skin, the ones whose voices—wordless screams—if heard, foretold death. He waited for death to take him.
Of course, the girl was not death. The girl that Gerald saw that night in the bog was Mary Ellen Boyle, our great-great-grandmother, which means you now know exactly how this story is going to go.
When the girl pulled Gerald out of the thick black mud, the heavens opened and the misty, drizzly air became sliced through with cold, hard rain. Mary Ellen grabbed Gerald’s hand, he hoisted the sapling into his other arm, and they ran through the deluge to the edge of the cliff, to a tiny cottage that might once have been a shepherd’s hut, staring out at the stormy sea. It had no windows, doors, or roof, but a cluster of hawthorn trees had grown over it, making a canopy to keep out the rain.
Gerald was wracked with tremors, shivering so hard his teeth clacked inside his mouth. He could not tell if this was because of the cold, the effort of having struggled inside the bog for hours, or if it was simply the effect this beautiful, ghostly woman was having on him.
When he spoke, his voice was hoarse from having shouted half the night. His voice was faint from wanting.
“Are you death?” he asked the girl.
She only smiled and shook her head, and her hair, under a damp woolen shawl, escaped in copper tangles.
She took him in her arms to warm his bones, to calm his quaking, and if he truly believed she had come to take him to his death he would have gone willingly. He left his mud-covered clothes on the dirt floor of the hovel and she threw down her shawl for them to lie on. If the rain came through the hawthorn roof, neither of them noticed.
In the morning, Gerald put his damp and muddy clothes back on, retrieved his sapling from behind the tiny cottage, and returned to the Big House with the full intention of forgetting this whole misadventure completely.
But he couldn’t stop thinking about Mary Ellen. Never mind his wan blond wisp of a fiancée. Her face drifted in his memory. Did she have green eyes or blue? Mary Ellen’s were sea-gray, as light as clouds before dawn. Her face was freckled, flushed with the abrasive salt air of the coast. She was all the more lovely for it. Her arms were roped with muscle, her thighs sturdy where his fiancée’s were slim and soft. Mary Ellen looked like she could easily survive the end of days, no matter how starved and pinched her cheeks were underneath their half-apple cheekbones.
While Gerald ate in a warm and comfortable dining room, his workers went hungry, were soon ready for revolt. Inspired by others around the country, Gerald’s tenants organized a rent strike. It did not go well. There weren’t enough of them for the strike to be effective, and Gerald evicted seven families from his land in one night, calling on the constabulary to break the cottage windows to ensure the families could not return.
The screaming got worse. He could hear it in the daytime. He could hear it as he took his tea. He could hear it as he sat on the toilet. He could hear it as he wrote a hundred letters to his half-forgotten sweetheart that he never sent, and plaintive missives to his mother to persuade his father to reconsider and send his younger brother here instead.
As the weeks went on, the only light in his constant dark thoughts was Mary Ellen. He went to the abandoned cottage on the cliffs across the bog every night, waited like a shadow by the entrance. And, every night, she met him there.
His heart was pulled by his sheer hatred of this godforsaken place and his obsession with the young woman. Strong arms, strong thighs, freckles in places he’d never before thought that freckles could be. Rough lips chapped by the cold and the sea. Callused hands he longed for more than his sanity. For a few stolen hours in the middle of every cold and rainy night, the couple kissed and whispered, touched and held and dreamed.
Perhaps he truly loved her, but he hated her country more. At no moment in their secret meetings did he ever mention his sweetheart back in England. The woman to whom he was engaged to be married. The woman who was his ticket out of this awful place, away from the screaming wind and never-ending rain and the sour-faced peasants. Because, once he was married and his new wife was with child, it would simply not be possible to stay on at the Big House. These cliffs, these rocks and bogs were no place to raise a baby. His father would surely agree: The next generation of Ryses would have to return to England, their feet never to touch Irish soil again. He would be more glad of this than he had words to say.
But, until that happened, he met Mary Ellen every night when the moonlight was shrouded in cloud. He kissed her and whispered nothings that were as sweet as ripe apples, but that meant far less to him. What was love, he asked himself, when he would not be here for more than another season? What was love when she was a peasant and he her landlord? What was love when not state nor church nor family would ever bless their union?
Back home, his mother and his fiancée made wedding plans. Their letters to Gerald were full of lace and beads and invitations. They felt to Gerald as though they came from a world away. Far from the tenant agitators, the political unrest, the scowls of the workers, the rain, and the screams. Far from the hovel in which he met a girl each night, knowing well that he could never make an honest woman of her.
Meanwhile, Mary Ellen was craving apples.
8.
Exit, pursued by a bull
Dublin and Galway, 2012
I turned the last page of the letter over, wanting to be told what happened next. I now realized that Mandy had been researching the family curse. This was what all her notebooks and folders, her library books about nineteenth-century landed gentry had been about. But her letter didn’t explain the curse. Barely mentioned it. And it didn’t finish the story. Instead, on the final page, Mandy had written an address that was on the outskirts of Galway city.
She had been planning a birthday road trip for me.
Cross-country, mapped out by her hand. I want to tell you a story, her letter had started by saying. To explain the curse. To explain our family tree. To explain where I’m going. To help you understand why.
Mandy had started the journey without me. And it seemed that she wanted me to follow. Obviously, Galway was the first stop on the map.
I snuck back into the house and packed a small bag. Rachel was in her bedroom with the door shut, so I left a note on the kitchen table telling her I was staying with Finn for a few days, then stared blankly out of the top-deck window of the number 130 bus to Dublin city center, where I would change and get the bus to Galway.
I’d been to Galway a few times before—once with Mandy for some hippie harvest festival her friends were performing at, and a couple of times with Rachel for the Christmas market—but I didn’t recognize the address Mandy had written down, had no idea why she’d send me there.
Stopped at a set of traffic lights, I glanced down at the street below and there, standing in front of a small petrol station missing most of its sign, was a bull.
A horse I would have expected. It wasn’t unusual for Dublin traffic to slow behind a horse. A cow would have greatly surprised me in the inner city, but I might have chuckled to myself and turned away. But a bull—enormous, slate gray, with gleaming white horns—a bull was unheard of. I blinked, convinced I was hallucinating.
The bull looked up and met my gaze through the window. He nodded.
I snapped my own head around and stared straight through the front window, heart thudding. The traffic lights changed and the bus trundled on and I didn’t look back.
* * *
—
My phone was hot with the map open and I was the moving blue dot. I didn’t know what I was looking for until I found it.
The address Mandy had left me was that of a high school. Interdenominational by the looks of it. No statues of Mary in alcoves in the walls, no crosses above the doorways. The students didn’t wear uniforms, so I almost looked like I belonged, slipping through the front gates with my backpack and my earphones, looking for a sign, a reason why my sister had sent me here.
It must have been break time. Students thronged the corridors. I saw hoodies and jeans, hair both dyed and shaved, jewelry on wrists and around necks. Hockey sticks, guitar cases, schoolbags covered with enamel pins. A large bulletin board opposite the library announced music and drama club auditions, helpline numbers, and reminders of the school’s LGBT society meeting times. A bumper sticker at the bottom of the board said RESPECT PERSONAL PRONOUNS.
My chest felt tight suddenly, heavy with a sort of longing. I doubted the bulletin boards in my school were aware that one could use a pronoun to which one had not been assigned. I thought about rainbow enamel pins, purple plastic Venus earrings, protest leaflets. My eyes ran over the notices. I wondered how I would have turned out if I’d gone to a school like this.
The wall beside the noticeboard was covered in A5 prints of students’ pictures under the heading KNOW YOUR CLASS REPS. She was second from the left.
She had pale skin, light freckles, gray eyes. Her hair was auburn, a reddish chestnut, thick and curled. Her cheeks were like apples and she had a gap between her two front teeth. She was every picture I had ever seen of Mandy at sixteen. Underneath her smiling face, somebody had written Class 5B: Ida Nolan.
I had assumed that Mandy’s daughter was a child. Eight or nine years old, her birth aligning with one of Mandy’s longer disappearances, her gestation somehow gone unnoticed.
I had not imagined that my sister’s daughter would be the same age as me.
* * *
—
I waited by the school gates and watched each student as they left. When I saw her, I stood. She was adjusting the strap of her backpack, mouth twisted in concentration, long braid tangling with the strap on her other shoulder. When she saw me, she stopped. The crowd broke like waves around us.
Later Ida told me that for a second she thought I was Mandy. Less than a second. Just enough time to realize that I couldn’t possibly be. That I was barely a year older than her. That there was nothing in my wide eyes to suggest that I had known she’d be here.
But here she was. And here I was. We were undeniably family.
9.
A family reunion
Galway, 2012
I said her name aloud, to test it. “Ida?”
I knew I’d mispronounced it by her slight wince. Not Eye-da, then. Eee-da probably. I wondered who had named her, her father or Mandy.
Emotions played over her face until she seemed to reach a decision and pulled out of the crowd to join me by the gate.
“You’re her sister,” was the first thing she said to me. “Amanda’s.” Her knuckles were white around her bag’s strap.
“Mandy.” My voice was faint. “We call her Mandy.”
“Mandy,” Ida said. “I’m sorry for your loss.” She winced again, spoke louder to cover it. “Which one are you, Rachel or Deena?”
“I’m Deena.” My voice had almost disappeared. I wished I hadn’t come here.
“Deena.”
We stood and stared at each other.
“Look,” Ida said, after several interminable moments of silence. “Why don’t we go around the back of the assembly hall, away from the noise?”
I nodded mutely and followed my niece as she strode, purposeful and self-possessed, back through the gate against the throng, giving waves and short nods in response to the greetings coming toward her from students and teachers. She was tall, like Mandy, wiry where I was all softness. She led me to a set of stone steps around the back of the building, in front of a sign that said FIRE EXIT.
She dropped her bag and sat. I leaned awkwardly against the railings.
“I guess you saw me at the funeral,” she said to her hands. “I’m sorry I didn’t come over. Introduce myself. Maybe I should have, but it was already kind of too much, you know? I never met her, but I’m sure you know that. My dad barely even talks about her. I don’t really know why I went. Dad still has no idea that I did.”
I let each scrap of information sink in. I hadn’t seen Ida at the funeral. I’d been imagining her to be a little girl, perhaps unaware of her biological family, having been, I’d assumed, adopted as a baby. I could never have imagined this bright, vibrant girl my own age, tall and slim, popular and beautiful: a more wholesome version of my sister. This girl who was everything I wasn’t. This girl who knew my name.
“She never mentioned you,” I whispered.
Ida closed her eyes, briefly, as if she’d felt a sudden pain.
“Then why are you here?”
I dropped down onto the step beside her. She wasn’t what I’d expected, but I knew things she didn’t. She was poised but nervous. I could tell by the way she twisted her hair around her fingers, brushed dust from her jeans, straightened her bag on the step, touched her hair again.
“I’m here because she sent me.” I looked at my niece as I said it. “Ida. Mandy. Your mother. She isn’t dead.”
The look she gave me was sharp, direct. “I was at her funeral.”
Because there was no way of making any of this less surreal for either of us, I took out Mandy’s letter, and the brief note she’d left on her bed before she disappeared. Ida read the note first. I watched her eyes take in every word.
Going to the end of the world.
I watched her eyes narrow to make out the second tear-smudged sentence, made all the less legible now by repeated foldings and unfoldings.
Give all my love to my daughter.
I watched her eyes fill with tears.
“I found this stuck in my garden gate this morning.” I touched the letter she held in her lap. Ida twitched reflexively, as if afraid I would take it from her. “It’s how I knew to come here.”
Ida said nothing. She sta
rted to read.
It was a long letter. A long story. She didn’t rush through it, like I did, hands shaking, breath held. She took her time, drank it all in. She didn’t once look up from the page.
In my pocket, my phone pinged a message. It was Finn.
Where the fuck are you, Deena? Rachel’s now calling Mam because you said you’d be staying here for a few days. I had to bullshit about you being up in my room but not wanting to talk. Mam’s only buying it because of the funeral. Haven’t heard from you all day. Starting to freak out here. Tell me where you are or I’m calling Rachel
Don’t freak out. I’m in Galway. Explanation forthcoming.
Finn’s response was immediate and contained an uncharacteristic number of exclamation points.
WTF ARE YOU DOING IN GALWAY THAT DOESN’T HELP IN THE SLIGHTEST!!!!!!!
A small sound from Ida, not quite a gasp. She turned over the last page of the letter, then turned it back again.
“That’s where it ends?”
I put my phone down, ignoring Finn’s incoming call. “Yeah. With the address of your school.”
Ida took a breath, shook her head. “She sure could tell a story, your sister.” She stacked the pages so their edges aligned perfectly, shushed the lot back in the envelope. “What’s the deal with this curse she talks about at the start?”
I tried to shuffle my thoughts into order. The deal with the curse was still a little blurry to me. “Mandy believes there’s a curse on the Rys family, heralded by three banshees.”
“Banshees,” said Ida, one eyebrow raised. “Like ghosts who scream before somebody dies.”
“That’s right. Only here the scream is part of the warning.” I had to swallow hard before speaking, brushing aside the scream of the woman in the bay, the long gray hairs wrapped around the gate. Nowhere in Mandy’s explanations had she said anything about actually seeing these ghosts. “And it doesn’t necessarily announce a death.”
All the Bad Apples Page 5