Lark's Eggs Read online

  The boy listened with interest. It was as if he were picking up fragments of her life and mentally piecing them together.

  Soon it was too cold to sit on the benches any longer. Miss Duffy was confined to her home. She caused some horror among her neighbours in mid-November when the pipes broke. It didn’t occur to her to call a plumber and she could be seen carrying her dirt out in buckets to empty it on the hilltop.

  She rarely saw the boy now. But sometimes he passed as she languished outside her home. She never failed to compliment him, remarking on some aspect of his appearance or some item of his clothes. ‘Your hair is lovely today,’ she’d pipe, or, ‘You’ve got a beautiful jumper.’There was no way of acknowledging her compliments and the boy could only smile inanely.

  One day he passed her wearing caramel trousers, a bright, modish shirt randomly open at the neck. Under his arm he bore a record, the spectral faces of a pop group peering from the red netherworld on the cover. The record drew an inevitable question from her. ‘Do you like music?’ she called. The boy said he did. Then for some reason she added, ‘I think you have great times,’ a look of endearment, a look of envy, in her eyes. She equated youth and good looks with happiness and activity. The boy didn’t say anything, just looked at her with his non-committal smile.

  They didn’t meet in the following weeks, no sign of Miss Duffy in those weeks except at mass which she never missed. Kneeling at the very back of the church she always seemed rather bewildered, her expression similar to that of a child attending its first church service.

  On Christmas Eve the boy passed her on the street. It was late, the street crowded. Her coat open, her body was thrown forward as she walked stolidly in front of the lighted windows. She seemed to be engulfed by the bustle and the crowd, a threatened look on her face. The boy greeted her brightly, trying to catch her eye. But she didn’t hear him. She was probably unaware of where she was, the time of year. It was the last time he was to see her. Some weeks afterwards Miss Duffy heard he’d cut his wrists and was undergoing treatment in a psychiatric hospital. It was totally unexpected. It caused shock, a wave of speculation. There was something remote about suicide cases and suicide attempts, they were among the few extraordinary things in the undercurrent of small town life and people relished them for that.

  Miss Duffy felt left out of all the talk. However, one neighbour told her that the boy had been living under severe mental strain in the past months. He’d been suffering from acute loneliness. The neighbour also informed her that the boy’s doctors were discouraging people from visiting him as too much attention now would make his recovery impossible when he returned to normal life.

  Though Miss Duffy had come to know him quite well she felt no immediate sympathy for him now. The incident was unreal, part of the growing unreality of life around her, an unreality which was hedging her in.

  While he was away she herself disappeared. A nephew sent her to a hospital in some faraway town. She wasn’t really able to look after herself anymore.

  In the course of the year some of her neighbours heard that she’d died. But she’d been away too long and her death was like an unnoticed exit. Most of those who knew her remained unaware of it.

  Her house fell into a state of perpetual neglect, the paint wearing off. It looked reproachful among the cleanness, the order of the other houses.

  Teddyboys

  With a curious sultry look they waited, diamonds in their eyes, and handkerchiefs, thick and scarlet, in their pockets. They stood around, lying against the bank corner, shouldering some extraordinary responsibility, keeping imagination, growth, hope alive in a small Irish town some time around the beginning of the sixties.

  Then mysteriously they disappeared; all but one, Jamesy Clarke, gone to Birmingham, London, leaving one solitary Teddyboy to hoist his red carnation. It was a lovely spring when they left. I was sorry they’d gone. But there was Jamesy.

  He bit his lip with a kind of sullen spite. His eyes glinted, topaz. His hair gleamed. His shirts were scarlet and his tie blue with white polka dots.

  As spring came early young men dived into the weir.

  I wanted, against this background of river teeming with salmon, to congratulate Jamesy Clarke for staying to keep the spirit of dashing dress and sultry eyes alive. Instead I followed him, ever curious, watching each step he took, knowing him to be unusually beautiful and somewhat beloved by the gods. Though nine years of age, going on ten, I knew about these gods. An old fisherman by the Suck had once said, ‘The gods always protect those who are doomed.’ I harboured this information. I told no one.

  Jamesy had stayed to look after his widowed mother. He lived in the ‘Terrace’ with her, behind a huge sign for Guinness, bottles abandoned, usually broken, children running about, a cry and a whine rising from them that aggravated the nerves and haunted like other signs of poverty haunted, dolls broken and destroyed, old men leaning against the men’s lavatory, drunken and abused. His mother was allegedly dying from an unspoken disease, sitting among statues of Mary that surrounded her like meringues, and cough-bottle-smelling irises.

  I’d never actually seen his mother. But I knew she dominated the tone of Jamesy’s life, the prayers, the supplications, the calling on Our Lady of Fatima. Our Lady of Fatima was very popular in our town. She adorned most houses, in some more agonized than others, and a remarkable statement under her in my aunt’s house: ‘Eventually my pure heart will prevail.’

  The fields about the river were radiant with buttercups, fluff amassed and fled over the Green and odd youngsters swam. I noticed Jamesy swimming a few times, always by himself, always when evening came, taking off his clothes, laying them in the stillness, jumping into the water in scarlet trunks. He never saw me. He wasn’t supposed to. Like a little emissary of the gods I wandered about, taking note, keeping check, always acute and waiting for any circumstance that could do him harm. He was much too precious to me. His shirts, scarlet and blue, impressed me more than Walt Disney movies. But it was his eyes that awed me more than anything, eyes faraway as the Connemara mountains and yet near, near in sympathy and in sensation, eyes that saw and kept their distance.

  Scandal broke like mouldy Guinness when apparently Jamesy was caught in the launderette making love to a girl. The girl was whizzed off to England. Clouds of June gathered; the Elizabethan fortress by the river stood out, one of the last outposts of the Queen in Connaught. Jamesy kept his distance. He didn’t seem troubled or disturbed by scandal. He went his way. It was as though this girl was like washing on the line. She hadn’t altered his life, hadn’t changed him.

  He smoked cigarettes by the bank corner, alone there now. Their scents accumulated in my nostrils. I took to naming cigarettes like one would flowers. A mantra rose in my mind that ordered and preoccupied a summer: Gypsy Annie, Sailor Tim. I called cigarette brands new names. I exploited all the knowledge I had of the perverse and applied it to Jamesy’s cigarettes.

  Ancient women sold pike in the Square. Sometimes they looked to the sky. They’d never seen a summer like this, broken cloud, imminent heat.

  Old men wiped their foreheads and engrossed people in conversation about the Black and Tans. Everything harkened back; to the Rising, to the War of Independence, to the Civil War. Forgotten heroes and cowards were discussed and debated. The mental hospital looked particularly threatening; as though at any moment it was going to lurch out and grab. Jamesy swam. He had no part in conversation about the Rising, in talk of new jobs or new factories. Where he was financed from I don’t know but he led a beautiful life and if it hadn’t been for him the summer would not have been exciting and I would not have eagerly waited for the holidays when I could follow him along the railway tracks, always at a distance, until he came to a different part of the river from the one he swam in, sitting there, thinking.

  When he started going out with a tailor’s daughter I was horrified. I knew by the way she dressed she did not have his sense of colour. She walked with an absence of di
gnity. His arm always hung on her shoulder in a half-hearted way and she led him away from the familiar spots, the bank corner, the river.

  I saw them go to a film. I observed him desert the summer twilights. I felt like writing to his friends in England, asking them to come back and send him out or feeding his mother with poison to make her complaint worse. Even the hold his mother’s disease had on him seemed negligible in comparison to this girl’s.

  I noticed the actresses who starred in the films they went to see, Audrey Hepburn, Lana Turner, and privately held them responsible. I looked up at Lana Turner one night when they’d entered the cinema and told her I would put a curse on her.

  I learnt about curses from a mad stocky aunt who lived in the country, was once regarded with affection by all our family until an uncle had a mongoloid child. Then attention diverted from her and she started cursing everyone, making dolls of them and putting them in fields of corn. I knew it worked. About the time she did one of my mother, my mother went to hospital. I knew it was an awful thing to do. But there was too much at stake.

  The more I cursed her though, the more defiant Lana Turner looked, her breasts seemed almost barer. I stopped cursing her and started swearing at her, swearing at her out loud. The local curate passed. He looked at me. I said, ‘Hello Father.’

  He wondered at a child staring at a poster of Lana Turner, calling her by all the foul names my father called my mother.

  Come July young men basked by the river. The sun had broken through and an element of ecstasy had come to town, towels, bottles of orange thrown about. Ivy grew thick and dirty about the Elizabethan fortress, gnats made their home there and a royal humming commenced then, a humming and a distillation of the voices of gnats and flies.

  The evenings were wild and crimson; clouds raged like different brands of lipstick. That’s one thing I’ll say for Jamesy Clarke, he still took the odd swim by himself. In the silence after twilight he took off his clothes and dived into the water. Threads were whispered over the grass by the spiders. Wet descended. The splash of water reverberated. There were moments of silence when he just urged through the water. I waited across the field, my head in my lap. If I could I would have built him a golden bridge out of here. I knew all that was piled against him, class, the time that was in it, his mother. It no longer mattered to me that this town should have him. What I wanted for him was a future in which he could puff on smart cigarettes in idyllic circumstances. But much as I racked my brain I could think of nowhere to place him. London and Birmingham sounded too dour, Fatima was already peopled by statues of the Blessed Virgin and other places I knew of I was uncertain of, Paris, Rome. There just might have been a place for him in Hollywood but I knew him to be too elegant for it, there were more than likely simpler and more beautiful places in the United States into which he could have fitted. I wanted him more than anything to be safe, though safe from what I didn’t know.

  He held his girlfriend’s hand about town. He sat on the fair green with her. He hugged her to him. He’d discarded jackets and wore orange T-shirts. A bracelet banded his arm, narrowly scathing hairs on his skin, which was the colour of hot honey. I looked to the sky above them, clouds like rockets in it. Perhaps his girlfriend did have something after all, a hunch of his existence. Nobody could have seduced him for so much time away from bank corner or river without responding to something in him. I forgave her. I gave up ownership. I played with the notion of being present at their marriage. I had it already arranged in my mind. He’d be dressed in white. She in blue. There’d be marigolds as there were outside the courthouse and his mother, virtually dead, would be in a movable bed in the church.

  Then one day things changed. The weather broke. Clouds that had been threatening, sending shadows coursing over wheat and water, now plunged into rain. The heat evaporated and a sudden cold absorbed all that was beautiful, warmth in old stone, the preening of daisies in sidewalk crevices. I shook inside. I had to stay in. I played with dinkies. I looked through books. I found no information relevant to life. I burnt a total of three books one evening, two about horses and one an adventure story set in Surrey. I became like a little censor, impatient and ravaging anything that didn’t immediately allow one in on the mystery of being. Dickens was merely sent back to the library. He was lucky.

  I wrote a letter to Jamesy; he stood stranded by rain.

  Dear Jamesy,

  I hate the rain. I wish I lived in a country where it didn’t rain. How are you? I’m not too well.

  I’ve decided I don’t like books anymore. I prefer things like clothes. My mother keeps giving out. She was giving out when the sun was shining and she gives out when it’s raining. How’s your mother? I said a prayer to Our Lady of Fatima for her yesterday.

  It’s raining outside now. I’m going to draw a picture of Mecca. I was just reading about Mecca where all the Moslems go. I’m going to draw a picture of it and colour it in. See you soon I hope.

  Desmond

  I didn’t send the letter of course. I coloured it in too, drawing pictures of Teddyboys along the sides. I also drew a scarlet heart, pierced by an arrow, the number three, emphasizing it in blue, and a tree trunk.

  I bore it with me for a while until one day it fell out of my pocket, the colours washing into the rain.

  Jamesy had had a row with his girlfriend. That was obvious when the sun shone again. He looked disgruntled. An old woman, member of a myriad confraternities, reported that he spat on the pavement in front of her. ‘Disgusting,’ the lady said. ‘Disgusting,’ my mother agreed. ‘A cur,’ the lady said. ‘A cur,’ my mother said. And the lady added, ‘What do you expect from the likes of him. His eyes,’ she screeched with outrage, ‘his beady eyes.’

  It was true. Jamesy’s eyes had changed, become pained, narrow, fallen from grace. He wore a white jacket, always clean though in his despair, and his features knotted in disgruntlement as cold winds blew and a flotsam of old ladies wandered the town, gossiping, discussing all shapes of misdemeanour with one another in highly pitched, off-centre voices.

  Jamesy edged into the voice of autumn, his dislocation, his pain, and his eyes spitting, a venom in them now.

  He began seeing his girlfriend again. This time he tugged her about town. She was a vehicle he pushed and swayed. Though a tailor’s daughter she had her good points, grace I had to admit, and an almond colour in her hair, always combed and arranged to a kind of exactitude.

  Lana Turner never graced our cinema again. There were posters that showed motorcycles or men in leather jackets, their faces screwed up as they unleashed a punch on someone. I lost Jamesy on his trail more than often.

  Women whispered about Our Lady of Fatima now as though she was threatening them. Voices spoke of death, a faint shell-shocked murmuring each time a member of the community passed away. Death was wed into our town like a sister, a nucleus about which to whisper, a kind of alleyway to the Divine.

  Almost as suddenly as it went, the fine weather returned, revealing a curious harvest, tractors in the fields, farmers brown as river slime on bicycles. Then young men of town returned to the river. They were quieter now, something was pulling out of their lives, summer, imperceptibly, like a tide.

  Northern Protestants had come and gone, daubing a poster on the mill overlooking the weir, ‘What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’

  I couldn’t find Jamesy. There was no sign of him in the evenings, swimming. I started an odyssey, seeking him through field and wood. Birds called. I thought I heard Indians once or twice. Horses lazed about, the last flowers of summer sung with bees, standing above the grass, lime and gold. The bold lettering of the poster above the weir was in my mind, its message was absent. I did not understand it.

  My travels led me to wood and to a Georgian house lying outside the town. I hadn’t forgotten Jamesy but I kept looking, pretending to myself I’d see him in far-flung places.

  I sat on a hill one day and looked at the riv
er beyond. My T-shirt was red. My mind was tranquil. I used the moment to think of Jamesy, his eyes, his anguish. I had seen that anguish cutting into his face in the course of the summer, into his eyes, his cheekbones, his mouth. I had seen a sculpture gradually realizing itself and the sculpture, like beautiful stamps, like stained glass in the church, spoke of an element of human nature I did not understand but knew was there, grief. It was manifest in Jamesy. I wondered about his mother, her journey towards death, his attitude to it, his solitary trails about town, the manifold cigarettes, the grimaces.

  I imagined his mother’s bedroom as I had visualized it many times, one statue standing out among the statues of Mary, that of Our Lady of Fatima, notable for her beauty and the snake writhing at her feet. That snake I identified now as a curse, the one that blighted Jamesy’s face, the one that blighted Ireland, trodden on by the benign feet of one whose purity might, as she claimed, ultimately prevail.

  My searching for Jamesy was becoming more spurious, a kind of game now, an unspoken fantasy; gone was the grandeur of odyssey. I observed thicket, nettle and flower.

  Then one evening late in August unexpectedly I came on Jamesy. It was virtually dark, by the river, letters standing out on the poster, and as I wandered by the Elizabethan fortress noise became apparent to me. I looked over a hedge. There in the grass by a tributary of the river Jamesy was making love to the tailor’s daughter.

  The skirmish of a bird with a bush could not have been more noiseless than me, the running of an otter in the grass. I made my way home, shaken by what I had seen.

  I hated him, yet I hated him with a hatred that transcended Jamesy. I hated him for what he was doing, for the image he had given me, for this new distortion on stained glass.

  I wanted to share his simplicity, an empathy with his face. But there was more to him than a face and in the silence of my room, a wind rushing on the river outside as swans flew over, in the tradition of my rural aunt, in the tradition of Gypsies and the country Irish people rummaging with broken dolls, I cursed Jamesy.