You know what? I had looked at the photos. Several times. I had looked at them, but I’d never truly … I’d never truly looked at them – digested them, engaged with them, felt them, understood them – until I took them out after that little spat with Miss Hahn and sat down at the dining-room table and properly scrutinized …
I am a journalist by trade. I once credited myself with a measure of objectivity. Of dispassion. Of analytical skill. But when I looked at those photos this time around, with these new eyes, with this fresh perspective brought about by … by what? By my sudden need to torture Miss Hahn because Miss Hahn has this … this quite maddening way of … of detaching herself … this unreachable quality, this strange composure, this aloofness, this untouchability?
Glacial!
She talked about those glaciers (didn’t she?). In the sauna? Those huge pieces of ice sliding into each other and then producing those ghastly noises, almost ‘intelligent’-sounding. Communicating. Is it really any wonder that she felt so drawn to those arctic soundscapes, when she’s all but glacial herself?!
Glacial.
And when you communicate with her – or attempt to – you also feel yourself suddenly reduced to the level of inanimate matter. And for some reason this makes me long to … to undermine, to prick, to shatter …
Do I really want to hurt Miss Hahn?
Miss Hahn, of all people?
The Barbed Wire?
Isn’t the barbed wire the thing that keeps in, the thing that keeps out, the thing that snags and tears if you draw too close?
Why would I …?
More to the point, how could I …?
Eh?
Well, there’s the rub.
I suppose this can’t be unrelated to the fact that after I got home – I mean back, to Mulberry – I suddenly felt this overpowering impulse, this urge to … to launch a secondary attack. To try and bolster myself. Because I’d felt so vulnerable, so emasculated, so discomposed out there by the bus-stop. Then the drama with Mr Pemberton. My magnificent tumble.
She was an itch I longed to scratch.
Crazy, really.
So I made Mrs Barrow ring her up – on the pretext of being angry about the gypsies … and … and then I … so when she …
After the kiss. Let me just come out and say it. Okay, fine, I won’t pretend that it was the most successful or the most erotic or the most … most romantic of encounters, but still …
Still.
Because it was all about Bran and Kimberly, before. The photos. It was all about trying to see how Kimberly saw Bran. How Bran looked back at my wife, the camera. It was all about trying to work out whether what had happened between them was merely an accident – a feeling, that suddenly developed – or something connected to Kimberly’s … something more calculated and … and … and terrible. Were they just the bungling victims of cruel circumstance – Kimberly’s line – or the evil perpetrators of something way more dark and insidious? Because if the state didn’t think there was a serious case to answer, then why – why?! – did Bran end up incarcerated? On remand, yes. But refused bail? Considered a flight risk? Because he was parked in his own driveway! The incendiary device was hidden inside the boot of his own car! Did it explode accidentally or (as Kimberly always insisted) had it been planted there?
Kim was a photographer! Just a photographer!
And he was a muralist. A Republican sympathizer, yes, but not a terrorist.
Bran and I met at university. He was in the year above. Dashing. Handsome. Sullen. Charming. Vulgar. Debonair. He quit his history degree after eighteen months to train to become a … a stonemason, no less! Spent all his time back in Ireland, dangling off old churches on creaking harnesses, preserving gargoyles. Designing ornate tombstones. The painting came later.
But we kept in touch. Kim photographed some of his earlier work in Belfast as part of a larger post-grad project she’d undertaken on ‘Protest Art’.
Kim’s father died when she was twelve. He was raised in Derry then emigrated to Canada in his mid-twenties. Worked as a cabbie. Drank himself to death. Kim had no interest in politics. When talk would turn to politics at dinner parties, she’d help to clear the table, pull on some Marigolds and get started on the washing-up.
I suppose this was something else we had in common. Although I’ve never been afraid to engage with a subject, intellectually. Throw out a few fresh ideas. Play the devil’s advocate.
Was Kimberly too blank? Was it her very blankness that drew me to her? And our dear Miss Hahn? The ‘glacial’ Miss Hahn?
When she did eventually turn up … (the aforementioned ice-block). Well, I saw her before that. I was standing on the front porch, waiting for a first sighting of her, you know, pelting down the Sea Road – as she generally does – on her ancient bike. Awful trousers held in check by a pair of stainless-steel bicycle clips. I’ve seen her walk around in those things for hours on end. Sometimes just one. The other leg flapping freely. Or wearing them like two bangles on her wrists. Or even like an Egyptian-style ornament on her upper arm. Totally unselfconscious about it. What an extraordinary combination of studied and careless she is! Extraordinary! Who can possibly account for it?
And then there she was (anyway …). And I felt …
This awful, violent blasting inside my chest. Several landmines triggered between my ribs prompted merely – it would seem – by her distant outline. The mere suggestion of her. This ludicrous vibration (so counter-productive! So unhelpful! So unnecessary!). Like a high-pitched whine which you can’t actually register but which is killing your ears, just the same. And the mind knows. The body senses the damage. Not … not a good feeling. Not a welcome feeling. A disastrous feeling, in essence.
I think I may even have gasped! Leaned forward, clutching at myself. The sheer shock of it all! The horror that I might have … that this repellent creature might have … have worked her voodoo on me. And my rational mind screaming all the while: STOP THIS, YOU BLOODY IDIOT! IT’S ALL WRONG! IT’S HOPELESS! RIDICULOUS! LAUGHABLE! THERE IS SOMETHING SO … SO UNAPPEALING ABOUT THIS CREATURE, THIS MISS HAHN! TO FEEL THESE … THESE … LUDICROUS THINGS MUST BE THE UNCONSCIOUS EXPRESSION OF SOME KIND OF PROFOUND PSYCHOLOGICAL SELF-LOATHING!
MISS HAHN DOESN’T EVEN CARE! SHE DOESN’T CARE!
Oh, but she said that we had something in common. Remember? And isn’t commonality at the root of all romantic feeling?
NO, NO! MISS HAHN DOESN’T CARE! SHE’S ONE OF THOSE … SHE’S ONE OF THOSE ABSTRACT CREATURES, THOSE HEARTLESS, MONSTROUS, FECKLESS CREATURES. IT’S ALL … IT’S ALL SO UPTIGHT, SO UPTIGHT THAT IT ACTUALLY PROJECTS CARELESSNESS. BUT SHE’S SO BOUND UP, SO … SO GUARDED … SO … SO ICY AND CALCULATING!
Exhausting. This is exhausting. I can’t keep on thinking in capital letters. Aside from any other consideration it’s just way too gauche. Too adolescent.
I watched her in conversation on the sea wall with the gypsy woman. They embraced. Miss Hahn was covering her face. And when they embraced I felt … now, this is odd. I felt a twisting feeling in my belly of such profound rage and jealousy. In fact I ran to get the binoculars. Okay. I already had the binoculars with me. I had gone to fetch the binoculars (a trusty but rather unwieldy pair which live on a nail adjacent to the little notice-board on the kitchen wall) as soon as Mrs Barrow had confirmed that Miss Hahn was on her way over.
I peered at Miss Hahn through the binoculars. Miss Hahn has this funny habit of repeatedly tucking her hair behind her ear. Then it slips out and falls across her cheek again. Then she tucks it away again. I think she must have tucked her hair behind her ear at least twenty times in the course of a two-minute conversation.
Why doesn’t she just slide in a hair-grip? Eh?
Are her ears pierced? Impossible to tell, but I doubt it, somehow. Miss Hahn eschews all feminine ornamentation. Miss Hahn is a teenage boy with breasts. Two breasts. Right there. Perched on her ribs. Either side of her breast-bone.
Like a small pair of softly cooing, creamy-coloured quails. Just …
Perching.
Yes.
Where exactly was I heading with this?
The photographs … the suspicion … the explosion … the binoculars … Miss Hahn’s arrival on the porch, her cheeks flaming. Some discussion about the gypsy woman. Then that confounded child – Orla. Miss Hahn gets a special look on her face whenever she talks about the child. Sort of stricken. What’s behind that look? Confusion? Guilt? Helplessness? Terror?
And then suddenly I recollect a photo of Miss Hahn crawling through some blackthorn wearing exactly that look. In this little beret. Adorable in this little beret – red, I presume. In the foreground is Father Hugh (né Pietr) Tierney being crowned by the child, Orla, with a small daisy chain. The child’s expression is radiant. Then I recall another, later, photograph in the same set, where all three of them are sitting on the grass, but now they are four. Bran Cleary has joined them. He’s wearing a smock covered in paint. I suppose I should say five. Five of them, because Kim is there too, behind the camera. And in this picture another daisy chain is being made. Miss Hahn is making it. I try to remember whether Father Hugh …?
Miss Hahn is telling me about … meanwhile … Miss Hahn is talking about the sculptor, Jacob Epstein, who once lived for a period of time in the local area.
I’ve already mentioned the tunnelling to her, obviously. Then I refer, elliptically, to the photo. I stand up to go and fetch it, and as I do so, it dawns on me that the photos must have been numbered – collated – in the wrong order. Because in the second photograph, Father Hugh isn’t wearing his daisy-chain crown …
Unless, of course, he’s removed it and the child is stringing yet another …
Or …
I stand up to go and fetch the photo. I need to see whether … Is it possible that Miss Hahn wasn’t alone in that tunnel? Is it possible that following up close behind her was … who else? Bran Cleary?! That they had been … been … somewhere – beyond the blackthorn – alone, together? Kimberly was always very strict about keeping the photographs in a particular order.
Very strict. Each one numbered on the back: 01, 02, 03 … 30 … 134 …
I suddenly sit down again. I pick up my knitting. Miss Hahn starts to interrogate me about the tunnelling photo. She demands to see it. From an earlier position of apparent indifference, now she’s very keen, almost hectoring.
And me? Oh, I am overwhelmed by the desire to give her what she wants because, well, I love Miss Hahn. I am in love with her! Yes! Yes! The same way a sentence can be in-coherent or a person in-fected. With a virus. It’s so obvious, isn’t it? But how awful, eh?! How maddening! Ever since I first laid … from the very … even …
But I am equally overwhelmed by the need to stop her/it – to stop this in love – at all costs. This pointless, inappropriate, unreciprocated ‘in love’. I must deny her/it. But to deny Miss Hahn always seems to spark something within her. A special fire starts to burn deep, deep within the glacier. So I deny her. And I suppose, at some level, I have always denied her. Because … Why is that, exactly? I wonder.
A profound need to deny myself, perhaps?
To deny myself what, though?
Happiness?
Disappointment?
I watch Miss Hahn blazing – her temper darting and licking like the fluttering yellow flame of a lighted candle. Then away she storms. Poof!
One, little puff and she is blown out – back into the world again.
After I’ve waited to watch her cycle away – there she goes, steam coming out of her lovely unadulterated ears! – I run and fetch the photographs. I spread them out on the dining-room table. I start to re-collate the narrative. Throwing them around, sliding them about … Because there actually is a narrative …
Mr Pemberton was right! How could I have …? Was it merely hidden away inside the …? Or do I simply lack even the most basic ability – the insight, the sensitivity to …? But then why would Kim feel the need …? Who was she protecting, exactly? Herself? Bran? Kalinda? Orla? Not Miss Hahn, surely?
Was it just a mistake? An accident?
And – still more importantly – if this story was hidden, right here, in plain view, then what else might have escaped my attention? Am I just overwrought, overwhelmed, over-thinking, or is it really possible to tell a different story in pictures just by sleight of … just by switching … just by carefully …?
I suddenly start removing some of the pictures from the pile. First this one, then that one. There are eight of them, in total, at the heart of this particular little narrative. But eventually … after much soul-searching and analysis, I reduce them down to just two. The two most infuriating. The two most incriminating. Yes.
Without these two, the Bran Cleary/Carla Hahn story almost loses its meaning. The tunnel photo I opt to leave. That can stay. But the picture of the four of them …? Look! Look! Bran is staring over towards Miss Hahn, his eyes shining, making no palpable attempt to disguise his emotions, wearing the kind of half-dazed expression one might habitually relate to a minor head injury, perhaps, or severe and persistent alcohol/narcotic abuse (and who’s to say either might not be at the root of it?). Miss Hahn is frowning, biting her lip, gazing anxiously towards an all but oblivious Orla. The second photo? Orla is praying her rosary on the beach, kneeling, her back to the camera, wrapped up in a blanket. Miss Hahn is in the surf, some distance off. Although the casual viewer might not readily identify her … Only the focused eye, the interested eye, the eye that spontaneously dilates at even the most casual of contact with her irresistible (and I don’t use that word as a compliment, more in the sense of ‘compulsive’) outline.
Bran is to the fore, back also to the camera, sketching. Bold strokes, in charcoal. On his pad, on his small easel, on the floor scattered around him, a dozen brutal studies of … of Miss Hahn, no less! Head, body, ear, shoulder, arm, foot. This photo is also out of sync with a series of others. Because if you measure Miss Hahn’s progress along the beach … Unless of course she retraced her steps, then turned …?
In this series – as Kim has numbered them – Orla is the main focus. We start with a close-up (just her wan face, etched in tears), then slowly inch further back, then further still … The Miss Hahn photo comes last in order of number. But in fact – if we study her distant progress along the tideline – it was actually the first.
How extraordinary, I muse, that simply by swapping the order of these images Kim has transformed so completely the mood and the focus … The original order makes Miss Hahn the centre of it all (Bran Cleary is watching her, painting her, and Orla, quietly ignored – marginalized by her wanton ‘nurse’ – cries and prays). The new order? Orla is crying, then, as we pull back, she is praying, alone. But after a while, we see the father, standing guard. Orla isolates herself, but she is, at some level, cherished and protected.
And yet … If Kim was so eager to keep Miss Hahn’s significance to a minimum in the narrative (and the question this inevitably begs is: how, if Bran Cleary and Miss Hahn were … were … you know, did it happen that merely a few weeks later Kim and he were apparently …? Well, I suppose stranger things have happened. Did Miss Hahn ultimately reject Bran Cleary’s advances? Did the affair with Kim happen on the rebound? These two interludes were separated by the tragic death of his daughter, after all; did this damn family ever do anything, ever say anything, that wasn’t riven with drama, with significance? The rest of us live dreary lives in a slightly smudged close type. Their life was handwritten in exquisitely ornate calligraphy. Gold-embossed. With tiny, inked illustrations highlighting the opening letter of every paragraph) … uh, no, I was saying, why, if Kim was so keen to keep Miss Hahn’s narrative significance to a minimum, did she tell me to come to Pett Level in the first place and actively seek her out?
Why undo all her hard work like that in one fell swoop?
Why?
Well I suppose if she didn’t recommend I come here, if she didn’t mention Miss Hahn like that, just casually, in passing, I might have felt a surreptitious impulse to travel here under my own steam. And then I’d have been way more … more professional, more inquisitive, more alert. As it was I simply felt … obliged. Hence the first month of resentment, casual charm and sloth. Followed by two weeks of arguing and doodling (during at least one of these, permanently drunk).
Did Kim honestly understand my little proclivities, my idle faults so well? I find the thought quite … quite bewildering, no, no, almost touching, somehow.
Am I really to be considered such a formidable adversary, then? Or – and this isn’t such an appealing idea – so ridiculously easy to play, so pathetically biddable, so ludicrously transparent?
Hmmn?
If only I could remove myself – my natural prejudices – from the equation. If only I could step away and … somehow detach … be truly clinical, dispassionate …
How invested am I? Really? Or how cleverly have I been played (perhaps)?
Might it help to analyse Kim’s purported opinions on various individuals and then to gradually work my way back?
With regard to … to the child (for example), or Kalinda, her mother? Father Hugh?
Kalinda ‘Lonely’ Alloway/Cleary?
Orla Nor Cleary?
Father Hugh/Pietr Tierney?
The first: tough, creative, brilliant, fiercely ambitious, flawed.
That’s Kim’s view. And my view? Pretty much identical to hers. But throw ‘slut’ into the mix, will you? Oh, and ‘castrator’. To put it baldly, Kalinda ‘Lonely’ Alloway (we only met twice, and on the second occasion she stuck her tongue into my ear – it was a very, very long tongue – for a bet, apparently) always scared the living daylights out of me.
The second – Orla Nor – a Thalidomide child and a daddy’s girl. Utterly captivating, intriguing, tragic. Hysterical. Gentle. Sincere.
That’s Kim’s view. My view? Honestly? Attention-seeker, hysteric, circus freak.
Well you asked, didn’t you?
The third: Father Hugh (Eh? Father … Father who?!), a priest totally, totally obsessed. Slightly desperate and pathetic. Kind but somewhat weak. In way, way out of his depth.
That’s Kim’s view. My view? The priest was the patsy. Or was he the controlling genius? Might he even – with a little stretch of the imagination – have been both?
Because – let’s face it – if Kimberly wasn’t actually an honest witness … and if I am to be found so … so partial, so ignorant, so easy to manipulate, then what the heck else might be eluding me about this story?
My mind quietly wrestles with these questions as I take the two most ‘incriminating’ photographs of Carla Hahn to the open fireplace, turn them over and shove them into the grate. I find a match, strike it and, one after the other, in quick succession I … I burn them. I burn the very idea of them. I alter history.
It’s only as they flame up that my eye alights on the two numbers, written in Kim’s careful hand, at the rear. The first: 40. The second: 04.
Ha! Ha! Just a coincidence. Surely? I promptly stand up – knees creaking – somewhat chastened, then issue an involuntary yelp as the telephone commences its strident ring.
(Ho-ho! Guilty conscience, anybody?)
Hello?
It’s Father Hugh/Pietr Tierney. He’s cancelling our meeting. Father Hugh has a very soft, lilting, Irish voice, a kind voice. He’s ringing from a call box. He sounds a tad furtive. He apologizes and says that he’s changed his mind. He’s very sorry to have given me the wrong impression, and doubly sorry about my recent loss …
My recent …? But how …?
He will naturally be offering a mass (had offered? Would offer?) for the repose of Kimberly’s soul.
No. No. No. No. I won’t be fobbed off! I’m still coming, Father Hugh, I say, I must come (if only to have a chance to meet … well, myself. My double. Him. Me: the genius, the dupe). No, he says. There’s no point. He won’t see me, he … he can’t see me. It’s impossible.
Nothing is impossible, I say, not if you want it badly enough (this is a terrible cliché and a lie, to boot). Father Hugh shows no sign of buying this, but still I persist with it, I fly with it. I find myself waxing lyrical, emboldened by the Kim scenario (poor Franklin D.! The grieving widower!). I don’t have too much success with this approach, however. Father Hugh seems quite stern, quite determined. I cast my mind around … uh … uh … What would Bran do, I wonder, what would that over-stated, under-stated, sneaky bastard Cleary do?
If you won’t see me then I’ll … I’ll walk to you, I say (yes! Suddenly quite the Irish Lothario!). I’m coming to Douai on foot. Forty-odd miles. Like a pilgrim. I’m leaving now. This very minute. Would you turn away a man who had walked to see you, Father Hugh? Yes. I am coming on foot. I’m going to put down the phone and then I’m walking out of the cottage. No. First I’m gathering up the remaining photographs and placing them into an envelope in order to bring them over to you. I’m writing the monastery’s full address into my jotter. I’m grabbing a map, a compass. I’m putting on a coat, feeding two carrots to the rabbit, uh … a quick note for Mrs Barrow … is the oven off? And then I’m … I’m …
I’m running at high speed towards – or … or away – from heaven only knows what.