Lark's Eggs Read online

  ‘If I wasn’t married, I’d get lonely,’ said Cummian one evening.

  Water rats swam through the water with evening quiet, paddling with their forepaws. The tracks of the water rat made a V-shape.

  Sometimes in the early evening there’d be a harem of Traveller boys on the pier in the maple red of Liverpool or the strawberry and cream of Arsenal or the red white of Charlton FC or the grey white of Millwall FC.

  ‘Where are you from?’ asked a boy in a T-shirt with Goofy playing basketball on it.

  ‘You don’t speak like a Galwayman but you’ve got the teeth.’

  Cummian would tell stories of his forebears, the Travelling people—beet picking in Scotland, ‘We lie down with manikins.’ That ancestor used write poems and publish them in Moore’s Almanac for half a crown.

  Sometimes he got four and six pence. ‘Some of them were a mile long,’ said Cummian.

  ‘They used stuff saucepans with holes with the skins of old potatoes and they’d be clogged. They used milkcans especially. Take the bottoms out of milkcans. Put in new ones.’

  With his talk of mending I thought, recovery is like a billycan in the hand, the frail, fragilely adjoined handle.

  In the champagne spring tide of late July Cummian rode the horse in a bathing togs as it swam in the middle of the river.

  One afternoon there was a group of small boys on the pier fishing. One had a Madonna-blue thread around his neck, his top naked, his hair the black of stamens of poppies.

  ‘I’ll swim with you,’ he said, ‘if you go naked.’ I took off my togs. They had a good look and then they fled, one of them on a bicycle, in a formation like a runaway camel.

  Sometimes, though rarely, Traveller girls would come with the boys to the pier, with apricot hair and strawberry lips, in sleeveless, picot-edged white blouses, in jeans, in dresses the white of white tulips. Cummian’s wife came to the pier one evening in a white dress with the green leaves of the lily on it, carrying their child.

  Cummian was a buffer, a settled Traveller and lived in one of the cottages near the river, incendiary houses—cherry, poppy or rosette coloured—with maple trees now like burning bushes outside them. There’d be horses outside the Travellers’ cottages—a jeremiad for the days of travelling.

  One night Travellers were having a row on the green by the river—there was a movement like the retreat of Napoleon from Moscow, hordes milling across the green. Cummian, holding his child, looked on pacifically. ‘You’re done,’ someone shouted in the throng.

  There was a rich crop of red hawthorn berries among the seaweed in early fall, at high tide gold leaves on the river edge. Reeds, borne by the cork in them, created a demi-pontoon effect.

  A woman in white court high heels came around the corner one day as I stood in my bathing togs. ‘This place used be black with swimmers during high tide. Children used swim on the slope.’

  A swan and five cygnets pecked at the bladderwort by the side of the pier and the cob came flying low up on the river, back from a journey.

  In berry the pegwood, the berberis, the rowan tree were fairy lights in the landscape. The pegwood threw a burgundy shadow onto the water. With flood the reflection was the cinnabar red of a Russian ikon.

  One day in early November Cummian was on the pier with his horse alongside a man with a horse who had a sedate car and horse trailer. The grass was a troubled winter green. The other man, apart from Cummian, was the last to swim his horse.

  ‘He likes winter swimming,’ Cummian said of his. ‘Like you. He’d stay there for an hour. And he’s only a year.’

  With the tides coming in and going out there was a metallurgy in the landscape, with the tidal rivers a metallurgical feel, something extracted, called forth. A sadness was extracted from the landscape, a feeling that must have been like Culloden after battle. On Culloden Moor the Redcoats with tricornes had confronted the Highlanders.

  ‘Why do you swim in winter?’ asked Gawalan who was with Cummian one evening.

  ‘It’s a tradition,’ I said, ‘I used to do it when I was a boy,’ which was not true. Other people did it. I did it later, on and off in Dublin.

  Jakob Böhme said the tree was the origin of the language. The winter swim sustains language I thought, because it is connected with something in your adolescence—the hyacinthine winter sunlight through the trees on the other side of the river. It is connected with a tradition of your country, odd people—apart from the sea swimmers—here and there all over Ireland who’d bathe in winter in rivers and streams.

  A rowing boat went down the river one afternoon in late November, a lamp on the front of it, reflection of lamp in the water.

  Gawalan and Colín went to England. They’d go to see female stripteasers first in the city and then male stripteasers.

  With November floods there were often piles of rubbish left on the riverbank. A man in a trenchcoat, with rimless-looking spectacles, cycled up to the pier one evening. ‘I hear them dumping it from the bridge at midnight. It kills the dolphins, the whales, the turtles. You see all kinds of things washed in further down, pallets, dressers.’ He pointed. ‘There used be a lane going down there for miles and people would play accordions on summer evenings. A boxer used swim here with wings on his feet. There was a butcher, Killgalon, who swam in winter before you. He swam everyday up to his late eighties.’

  The river’s been persecuted, vandalized I thought, but continues in dignity.

  Early December the horse swam in the middle of the river, up and down, and I swam across it. The water rubbed a pink into the horse.

  Hounds, at practice, having appeared among the bladderwort on the other side, crossed the river, in a mass, urged on by hunting horns.

  A tallow boy’s underpants was left on the pier. Maybe someone else went for a winter swim. Maybe someone made love here and forgot his underpants. Maybe it was left the way the Travellers leave a rag, an old cardigan in a place where they’ve camped—a sign to show other Travellers they’ve been there—spoor they call it.

  Towards Christmas I met Cummian near his cottage and he invited me in. ‘Will you buy some holly?’ a Traveller boy asked me as I approached it. Cummian’s eyes were sapphirene breaks above a western shirt, his hair centre parted, a cowlick on either side.

  There was a white iron work hallstand; an overall effect from the hall and parlour carpets and wallpaper and from the parlour draperies of fuschine colours and colours of whipped autumn leaves. He sat under a photograph of a boxer with gleaming black hair, in cherry satin-looking shorts, white and blue striped socks. On a small round table was a statue of Our Lady of Fatima with gold leaves on her white gown, two rosaries hanging from her wrist, one white, one strawberry; on the wall near it a wedding photograph of Cummian with what seemed to be a pearl pin in his tie; a photograph of Cummian with a smock of hair, sideburns, Dom Bosco face, holding a baby with a patina of hair beside a young woman in an ankle-length plaid skirt outside a tent.

  We had tea and lemon slices by Gateaux.

  Christmas Eve at the river a moon rose sheer over the trees like a medallion.

  Christmas Day frost suddenly came, the slope to the water half-covered in ice. In the afternoon sunshine the ice by the water was gold and flamingo coloured.

  Sometimes on days of Christmas the winter sun seemed to have taken something from the breast, the emblem of a robin.

  Cummian did not come those days with his Clydesdale. I was the only swimmer.

  I was going to California after Christmas. I thought of Cummian’s face and how it reminded me of that of a boy I knew at national school, with kindled saffron hair which travelled down, smote part of his neck, who wore tallow corded jackets. His hand used to reach to touch me sometimes. At Shallowhorseman’s once I saw his poignant nudity, his back turned towards me. He went to England.

  It also reminded me of a boy I knew later who smelled like a Roman urinal but whereas the smell of a Roman urinal would have been tinged with olive oil his was with acne oi
ntment. One day after school I went with him to his little attic room and he sat without a shirt, his chest cupped. There was a sketch on the wall by a woman artist who’d died young. He used often walk with his sister who wore a white dress with a shirred front and a gala ribbon to an aboriginal Gothic cottage in the woods.

  He went to England in mid-adolescence.

  He was in the FCA and would sit in the olive-green uniform of the Irish Army, his chest already manly, framed, beside a bed of peach crocuses on the slope outside the army barracks which used to be the Railway Hotel, a Gothic building of red and white brick, a script on top, hieroglyphics, the emblems of birds.

  It snowed after Christmas. The trees around the river were ashen with their weight of snow. There were platters of ice on the water.

  As I cycled back from swimming Cummian was standing with two Traveller youths in the snow. There was a druidic ebony greyhound in historic stance beside them. Their faces looked moonstone pale.

  I knew immediately I’d said something wrong on my visit to Cummian’s house. It didn’t matter what I’d said, it was often that way in Ireland, having been away, feeling damaged, things often came out the way they weren’t meant. Hands in the pockets of a monkey jacket, hurt, Cummian’s eyes were the blue that squared school exercise books when I was a child.

  There was a Canadian redwing in the woods behind my flat who’d come because of the cold weather in North America. Never again I thought, as I was driven to Shannon, the attic room of beech or walnut, a boy half-naked, military smell—musk—off him, a montage on the wall. Choose your decade and change the postcards. Somebody or something dug into one here.

  I have put bodies together again here I thought, put the blond or strawberry terracotta bricks together.

  In San Diego next day I boarded a scarlet tram and a few days later I’d found a beach, the ice plant falling by the side, plovers flying over, where I swam and watched the Pacific go from gentian to aquamarine to lapis lazuli until one day, when the Santa Anas were blowing, a young man and a young woman came and swam naked way out in the combers, then came in, dried, and went away.

  The Red Bridge, a railway bridge, always porous, became lethally porous, uncrossable by foot. Cut off was an epoch, gatherings for swims.

  People would trek over clattery boards who knew it was safe because so many people went there.

  In the fall of 1967 trains would go over in the evening, aureoles of light, against an Indian red sun. You’d hear the corncrake.

  A little man who worked in the railway would stand in the sorrel and watch the boys undress.

  Shortly before he died of cancer he approached me, in a gaberdine coat, when I was sitting in the hotel, back on a visit. He spoke in little stories.

  Of Doctor Aveline who wore pinstriped suits, a handkerchief of French-flag red in his breast pocket, and always seemed tipsy, wobbling a little.

  Of Carmelcita Aspell whose hair went white in her twenties, who wore tangerine lipstick and would stand in pub porches, waiting to be picked up by young men.

  Of Miss Husaline, a Protestant lady who went out with my father once, who didn’t drink but loved chocolate liqueur sweets.

  Of the bag of marzipan sweets my father always carried and scrummaged by the rugby pitch; squares of lime with lurid pink lines; yellow balls brushed with pink, dusted with sugar, with pink hearts; orbs of cocktail colours; sweets just flamingo.

  And he spoke of the winter swim. ‘It was an article of faith,’ he said.

  Caravans

  The September river was a forget-me-not blue and the bushes on the other side were gold brocade. The old man who stood beside me as I got out of the river had glasses tied by a black strap around his head. He lived in a cream ochre ledge-top Yorkshire wagon with green dado, near the river.

  ‘I’ve been here fourteen years but I’m moving tomorrow to a field near Horan’s Cross,’ he said, ‘The children torment me. I hit some sometimes and I was up with the guards over it. We were blackguards too. They used wash clothes on stones in streams. There was an old woman who used wash her clothes and we’d throw stones at her.’

  Looking at the river he said: ‘A young butcher and a young guard used swim to the other pier, practising for the swim across the estuary in the summer. I used swim the breast stroke, the crawler. But then I’d put on swimming togs and go out and stand in the rain. It was as good as a swim.’

  There’d been another caravan parked beside the old man when I first came to live in a caravan nearby and an Englishwoman lived in it sometimes dressed as a near punk—in an argyle mini skirt with a chain girdle—and sometimes as a traditional Gypsy with a nasturtium yellow shawl with sanguine dapples and a nasturtium yellow dress with sanguine dabs on it which had attennae.

  In my first few weeks living in a caravan by a field there was the blood translucence of blackberries, the mastery of intricate webs, the petrified crimson of ladybirds on nettles.

  On one of my first mornings the guards arrived in plain clothes. A guard with jeans tight on his crotch banged on the door. ‘Mrs Monson has objected to you,’ he said referring to a woman who lived in a cottage nearby.

  In my first few weeks in a caravan I realized that living in a caravan there was always the laceration, the scalding of a nettle on you, the tear of a briar, the insult of a settled person. But you noticed the grafts in the weather, mild to cold in the night, fog to rain. You saw the pheasant rising from the grass. Close to the river you were close to the hunger of the heron, the twilight voyages of the swan, the traffic of water rats.

  In the night there was a vulnerability, a caravan by a field near a main road, a few trees sheltering it from the road, the lights of cars flashing in the caravan, a sense of your caravan’s frail walls protecting you.

  Coming to live in a caravan by a field near a main road was part of a series of secessions.

  A few weeks after I’d come to live in West Limerick I was gathering firewood in the wood behind my flat, yellow jelly algae on the logs, sycamore, maple, ash wings on the grass, when a little boy in a frisbee and a shirt with chickens wearing caps and flowers and suns on it, came up to me on a bicycle. His hair had the gold allotted to pictures of the Assumption of Mary in secretive places. The sky over the river was a brothel pink. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ When I raised my axe a little he dashed away.

  Sometimes as I walked in the fields in the winter I’d see him, tatterdemalion against the trunk of a rainbow. Dogs were often digging for pigmy shrews in the fields.

  One day he was in the fields with two greyhounds of a friend on leashes, one white with marigold mottles, the other fleecy cream and tar black with a quiff on the back.

  In the spring he knocked on my door. ‘I’m looking for haggard for my horse. I wonder can I put a horse behind your house?’ He had a seed earring in his right ear now.

  ‘If I be bereaved of my children, I am bereaved.’ Sometimes on summer nights when I swam in the artificially created pool in the fresh water part of the river behind my house he’d be there. On one side of the town bridge the river was fresh water. On the other side it was tidal water. He’d be leaping from the high cement bank with other Traveller children. Ordinarily he looked boxer-like but in swimming togs I saw that his legs were twig-like—almost as if he was the victim of malnutrition.

  ‘On your marks, ready, steady, go,’ he’d command the other children. ‘Did you ever tread the water?’ he’d ask me. Meaning being almost still in near-standing position in the water.

  In the early autumn when I’d go to swim on the pier in the tidal part of the river he’d often be there with his horse, shampooing his horse’s tail. The horse was a brown horse with one foot bejewelled with white and with a buttermilk tail. The boy’s features were hard as a beech nut or an apple corn now. He’d look at me with his blueberry and aqua-blue mix eyes. ‘I can’t swim her now. She’s in foal.’ The foal when it came was sanguine coloured. The boy left both of them in a meadow on the town side of the pier. The foal wou
ld sometimes go off on a little journey, a little adventure, and the mare, tied, would whinny until his return.

  I went to the United States and after my return in the spring I found the flat I’d been living in had been given away. I moved into another flat in the same house. It was unsatisfactory. Cycling to the pier I’d watch and listen for the little boy. There was no sign of him. I wondered if his family had moved on, if he was in England. Then one day at the end of April he rode to the river on his horse. The time for swimming the horses had come again.

  Up and down the Traveller men swam their horses. Steel greys—white horses with a hail of dark grey on them, Appaloosas—speckled Indian horses, skewbalds—batty horses, piebalds.

  Handsome horses with sashes of hair on their foreheads. A man with round face, owl eyes, stout-coloured irises, hard-bargained-for features, in an opaque green check shirt, spat into the water as he swam his horse. On his forearm he had tattoos of a camel, a harp, a crown.

  The boy when he brought his horse to the water had a new bridle on her, viridian and shell pink patterned. He told me of the things that happened while I was away. In February the otters had mated by the pier.

  I found a cottage in the hills outside the town and the boy’s father who had kettle-black eyebrows, piped locks, roach hairstyle, wore a Claddagh ring—two hands holding a gold crown—on his finger, drove me there.

  I put a reproduction of Botticelli’s Our Lady of the Sea over the fireplace, her jerkin studded with stars.

  ‘Say a prayer to St Mary,’ an English boy, the son of a painter, who cycled to a flat of mine in London in an apricot T-shirt, said to me.