Lark's Eggs Page 18

  Dear Aunt Bethan,

  I’m living in London now. It’s a very grey city but there’s also warmth here. You would not expect it at first arriving at Euston Station but it grows on you. It’s like lifting a dustbin lid and finding salmon instead of chewed-away kippers. I live in a fine big house. In fact it’s not unlike yours. I bought a brooch for you at Portobello market last Friday. I’ll keep it to send later as I want to post this now and I’d have to wrap the brooch up. Tibby has taken all the tissue. The children are grand; Mícheál and Tomás are going to school. They learn about worms that enter your bloodstream if you bathe in African rivers which they never learnt at home. I hope you are well. Remember what you once said to me: ‘One good lace blouse can be worth more than a marriage.’

  When I went to post that letter the mailbox refused to accept it. Aunt Bethan was a spinster aunt who lived alone in a big house by the river outside Ballina. She was the only one of my relatives I liked. As a child I’d been fascinated by the silver pointed pins in her pouch-like grey velvet hats.

  ‘Why did I leave Belfast? You’ve got to leave, haven’t you? It’s one of the laps along the way. What am I going to do now? Don’t know. Oh yes.’ Raymond was going to say something but stopped. ‘Redbrick cottages building into a palace. That’s the dream. My father used always to want to eat cornflakes on Coney Island. It was a name that stuck in his head. Me?’ Raymond shrugged. ‘The funny thing about red-brick cottages under low mountains is that they kill me’s.’

  My children brought bread and honey to the genii in the lower room as offerings. We visited London Zoo; we visited big stores in which premature Santas had already made an appearance. But Raymond dominated. He never went out. He’d come with the house. He just sat surrounded by books and devouring their contents like a rat. Once or twice in the café of a big department store, a red tartan skirt on me, in sudden exultation I imagined, as in a Hollywood movie, Raymond, the other side of the table, clenching the white and tender part of my wrists mouthing some sublimity that made everyone in the café perk up and listen, his hair falling, a blond fluency—the colour of Raymond’s hair fluctuated from dark to fair. But of course he never ventured out to make such a scene real. I’m sure he would have clenched my wrists like that had he come out. Not in any romantic way. We were friends now. Mates.

  A gull spiralled into the air above our mansions, a festive eddying of a white uprising streamer. The gull climbed to a point where he could see all London. I had a part-time job now and Raymond when I went out looked after the children.

  Raymond did go out. He came with us on our second visit to London Zoo. He wore a crocheted hat over his ears—one of mine—and he pointed to a polar bear on a grey November day and said that he’d always wanted a nose like a polar bear’s, a nose that was so solemn and pacific.

  I could not fully cope with our relationship on the level of the real so I created the fantastic; anyway our relationship always had buried in it an element of fantasy. I was the girl in the red tartan skirt in the house; he kept coming towards me. I was off to America. The smell of pristine new land, its riverside firs and its sluggish, congenial rivers already in my nostrils. But I was being separated from the boy I loved. For some reason there were always a dozen kegs of beer in the kitchen beside me so the smell of porter invaded the smells of the fir trees and unhurried waters. Raymond was always in white. That was his colour. And his hair was white. My arms were always waiting but he was entranced in a slow, continually revolving motion. I’d woken once or twice to find tears on my rich and ornate Foxford rug.

  The winos up the road burned their house down. They came running out in the middle of the night, tails of their coats on fire but bottles of Guinness still outheld. Cormac Fitzmaurice was seen to be waltzing with a hot water jar on the opposite pavement, gurgling to his dancing partner that it was he who’d started the fire. As if to validate his Nero claims his cheeks were smudged in red lipstick and red lipstick daubed his lips. There were red smears on the hot-water jar. But Rome did not burn down that night. Just the house. As he danced Cormac had a litre bottle of whiskey sticking out of his pocket. The label had messages scribbled in red biro on it. A woman with a youngish face, her hair white as a bog cotton under a mauve chiffon scarf, her hands deep in the pockets of her plush whitish coat, then began screaming, affirmedly facing the house, that she was the culprit. A competition ensued between her and Cormac, who’d stopped dancing, the two of them looking at the burning house, Cormac revealing that he’d loved setting houses on fire since he was a child and he’d once incinerated alive an aunt and her two trimmed white poodles in her house in Blackrock, County Dublin. The children claimed they saw three burning rats perched on the roof of that house against the multiple stars and frenzied sparks that night.

  A bomb went off in England. It tore through the entrails of the media. Many young people were killed. It ruptured the bowels of consciousness. We picked our way in a different planet for a few weeks. A Pakistani girl at school prodded Mícheál’s bum with a compass and venomously informed him he was a murdering Paddy and should return to where he came from. I maintained queenly dignity at work—gracefully mopping floors—bald managers stooped towards me. Well it wasn’t me who planted the bomb. What about the beam in your own eye? But the structure of my house was impaired. The landscape of England was transformed. Biting winds were said to have crept down motorways and isolated motorway cafés. A hideous orange light had overtaken everything. It glared in at night. Escaping it I descended to the cellars to try to discover the truth.

  ‘The English invaded Ireland in the twelfth century and they’ve been a bloody nuisance ever since. They ruined the crops and ransacked convents.’ An elderly, fragile nun at school contorted during history lessons. ‘Mind you there were some decent Protestants. Theobald Wolfe Tone being one such. To him is the credit of the Irish flag, green, white and gold. Green for Catholic. Gold for Orangeman. White for a true and lasting peace between.’The only orange I saw was the orange of the light outside; it even changed the colour of Raymond’s white dotted shirt as he crouched sacrosanctly on the floor. ‘Let us all pray, girls, for a United Ireland.’Theobald Wolfe Tone slouched along Sutherland Avenue in an old manky coat, a newspaper cutting dripping from his pocket.

  ‘My mother did not love my father but she married him. My father did not love my mother but he married her. My mother loved me but I was kidnapped by uncles with republican eyes. The annual Wolfe Tone commemoration was a great event. My uncles would get drunk in a nearby pub and start pissing on the other graves. That was the great festive point of the year. Pissing on graves in the cemetery Wolfe Tone was buried in. There was a little bridge over a brook nearby and in a short blue coat I’d run off there. I met a cow there once and we performed a pantomime together while the Wolfe Tone commemoration speeches were being made.’

  The odd thing about Raymond was that since this bombing his load had lightened a bit; he’d begun telling foul jokes, he quoted poetry freely. The children loved his telling of stories. He’d got them from a grandmother who lived in a house in the Antrim mountains, he told them.

  ‘My grandmother was Scottish really. She had boots in her voice, black boots. Children, we gathered. Her stories were of ghouls and headless men. She emphasized the blood around the rings of the headless men’s necks. As a girl she’d been lifted to and fro on gentle waves by currachs. She was in a different land now and rewarded the natives with monstrosities.’

  Where Raymond’s granny came from there was a church; a Catholic church. The faith had been preserved there but the statues were unusually bloody. Christs with blood streaming from their wounds, Marys with blood congealed at their hearts and in their heavenward-gazing eyes. Always a story of moving from one place to another, the currachs on gentle waves eventually bringing them to waves of a more turbulent kind.

  ‘There was a giant who lived in a castle on the edge of blackbog.’ I became one of the children. I listlessly filed in for Raymond�
�s story. Raymond’s granny had made many shirts, embroidered them, so I bought a white shirt, and embroidered it blue for Raymond’s birthday. A new shirt. A new human being. We dipped into wine and sang. December the tenth. It was drawing towards Christmas. I didn’t send any Christmas cards to Ireland.

  Raymond in an off-white embroidered shirt, serious creases in the shirt; his birthday. I had cut his hair, it had solemnized his head; candlelight caught and fiddled with gold locks. Raymond looked out—beyond the swooning candles what did he see? Mexico, Italy, Morocco. It was a time for currachs again but this time currachs would land in uncustomary blue waters.

  My children looked as students put up barricades. The state was coming. Charred beams stuck out where the winos’ house had been. The battering of hammers went on through the night. The local population of prostitutes, students, heroin merchants was threatened with eviction. The house I shared with Raymond was the only one without barricades. The state was welcome. We knew all about the state.

  ‘Blood, blood in the gutters, blood on white-washed house fronts. Blood on an old lady’s handbag. She looked at her bag with sudden disapproval as if the only appropriate thing was that it should fly away. The blood encircled her feet. It eddied under her. She started to scream and then I tried to scream and I couldn’t and I woke and I found a rat peering out a hole with much curiosity at me.’ Raymond was rambling. There was still an odd quiet hammer going. I’d brought him cocoa. I’d brought it right to his lips. A candle threw panoramic shadows in an Edwardian room. I’d had dreams like that as a girl in Mayo. I’d woken, gone to a window, tried to throw myself out. There seemed no returning from a state of madness. You had broken forever with the laws of logic. The laws that govern and make up everyday living. You had crossed some border into a hell. I suddenly looked into Raymond’s pale blue eyes—they were the same colour as the walls in parts of this house—and saw he had broken forever with the logic that governs everyday living and sustains even the vaguest cohesion of a will for everyday survival.

  Mícheál, hands behind his back, in a short blue coat, on a black and white day stood beside the charred beams of the winos’ house; I went out to retrieve him from a photograph of Leningrad after the siege I’d seen in a book in Maida Vale library.

  ‘Something’s drumming in my head. Something’s beating it in. I don’t own it anymore. It’s not mine. Once when I felt like this I used think of my granny as a girl in a red tartan skirt—she kept evil away—but it doesn’t work any more. I’ll have to think of something different. I can’t. I’ll think of you, Mary.’

  Mary was preparing for Christmas; she was travelling to the perimeter of her mind, shores in West Mayo where mountains were hidden in the evening reflections. Mary in a yellow ochre cardigan began to say a kind of prayer, a prayer different from the ones she was taught. She said prayers for her children, for Raymond. She grappled again for words that were sacred as a child. London revived the glint of evening on mother-of-pearl beads. She found things she thought she had lost forever; it was Advent in London and mistletoe was brought for rides on the Circle line. A black man holding mistletoe opposite her as the tube was drawing towards Westbourne Park told her to cheer up, that Christmas was coming. She looked at him. She had not been doleful. She’d been thinking of anterooms of her existence darkened for years and now lighted by a strange and probing grey light.

  Raymond became nervous, shivering. He carried trays about him with teapots on them. He began to act like a manservant, bringing tea to me as I lay in bed on Saturday mornings—the bed had been transported in from a skip by four friendly West Indians. ‘Leave it there,’ I’d ordered him. Then I’d search out his face. Every day I looked into it I saw something new crashing in it.

  ‘I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell you something. But I couldn’t find the words. Words are strange aren’t they? They’ve declared a war on my words. They’ve tried to take my vocabulary from me.’

  The state did not come. The state did not show much interest as yet in the decrepit houses. Students hitched home for Christmas. Prostitutes put their legs up and watched their little yelping TVs.

  ‘I wanted to tell you something. I wanted to tell you something. I wanted to tell you something.’ Raymond managed to scream one night but when I tried to put my arms about him he began shuddering; he did not want me to hold him.

  Why wasn’t he hitching home for Christmas? Why was I devoting so much time to him? I started becoming annoyed with the idea of him. There were some days I wanted to shake him but I was restrained by the presence of a dream: a boy in white and a girl in a red tartan skirt. This house was one I’d visited before. I was familiar with its rooms as I was familiar with its pain; I had come to relieve some of the pain from its big old walls.

  Shortly before Christmas a new woman arrived on the street and she made speeches outside at night about the coming of doom; the judgment; the nuclear bomb. She was from Wexford. Somehow forebodings of the nuclear bomb got mixed up one night as she stood in the middle of the road with her autobiography. She was a Protestant. Her father was a vicar in Wexford. Someone had given her a large bottle of whiskey for Christmas and she raised it in the air and shouted, ‘Does anyone have any holly? I’m itchy.’

  I didn’t see Raymond much before Christmas. I was working hard. London, its sea of Christmas, swept about me. Nigerian girls sang carols outside St Martin-in-the-Fields. I wanted to stop and thank them but the crowd was too thick and too onward rushing.

  Two days before Christmas a boy in white who looked the image of Raymond passed. His face was tanned. He’d obviously been South. He was all in white except for an Afghan coat. He passed a bird who was snipping at a whole packet of white sliced bread thrown out into a dustbin.

  ‘Hello. How are you?’ I entered Raymond’s room. He was just sitting there, saying nothing. ‘Well Merry Christmas.’ Christmas was a day off. Raymond did not want to talk and I closed the door, saying, ‘We’ll all be having turkey tomorrow night.’

  I pushed around London that day; I floated on the crowd, I had no more shopping to do but I just wanted to be part of this intimacy. I belonged now, I was a member of this metropolis and I wanted to share with the crowd the day before Christmas.

  Where do Cormac Fitzmaurices and drunk vicars’ daughters go for Christmas? There was no one on the street that night. Just a youth passed. A pink chiffon scarf around his neck and his hands enveloped in his pockets and his head worriedly bent over.

  I didn’t go to midnight mass. With the children I stood at the window and looked in the direction of the church of Our Lady Queen of Heaven in Queensway. I knew I would not be going home again, except for their funerals, not for their marriages. ‘Leave father, mother, sisters, brothers, and come follow me.’The half-remembered text of Christ in my mind. I had crossed a border now. There was no going back. My appearance had changed. My face had changed. I had no need of mother or father or sisters or brothers. Or husband. They’d tried to do me in. This city, this unkind sprawl, had given me back a modicum of self-respect and had pointed me on a road again. In the middle of the family-planning clinics and the abortion stopping points Christ was tucked into his crib in a church where winos snoozed and snortled now during midnight canticles.

  I’d never been a very extravagant cook but I’d bought the Times cookbook and in its pages found the most elaborate Christmas dishes.

  Sugar glazed gammon.

  Slow roast turkey with chestnut stuffing.

  Duchesse potatoes.

  Purée of Brussels sprouts.

  Apricots with brandy and cream.

  Plum pudding with brandy butter.

  And something called ‘the bishop’ on which we all got merry. Hot port with sugar, cloves, lemon and mixed spice.

  Raymond in a three-piece dark suit I’d picked up for him hid and spluttered with laughter behind a bottle of Beaujolais nouveau. A fire blazed obligingly. I was wearing a white sleeveless blouse I’d presented to myself for Christma
s. Daddy Christmas had abandoned ruminative toys under the Christmas tree. Wooden lorries from Norway. Dolls from Tibet. A reproduction of a Michelangelo print was now tacked uncertainly on the wall, Christ in the nude, rising. Mícheál bawled out a song in the Irish language. Tibby gave us a nursery rhyme in an English accent. Tomás yelled that he wanted more turkey after the final helping of the pudding. In our state of merriment we had party games and party games led to a play Raymond and I did together.

  He took off his suit and played me, putting on a dress. I put on his suit. The children loved it. My whole life had been waiting for a play. There’d always been an imminent play. The mass. Ragged, scrawny pageants at school. To perform, to dramatize, the need to do these things, was always in my nature. This was an improvisation. There were no ready-made lines. But the script had been arranged.

  Raymond: ‘Well now, Mr. What’s it you’re after?’

  Me: ‘A nice young lady.’

  Raymond: ‘Haven’t you found one yet?’

  Me: ‘I’ve been looking in all kinds of places. I fell in love with a nun but she up and slipped away when she was in my arms. She left a holy medal though.’

  The children howled with laughter. But there was also another play taking place.

  I have met you before in another time. This city brings other times, past lives together. I know your face. You’re part of a shared guilt. We did it together.