My mother will visit me soon, I expect. She is a tennis champion, and this time of year, summer, she will be chasing one tournament after another, I expect. I have no interest in the game where she has made such a name for herself, so our conversation will, as it always has been – it will be limited, I expect. Yes, her diary is full, with commitments to travel and to play and to stay in expensive, well-run hotels, hundreds of servants attending to her every need, all very necessary for her continued well-being, I expect. My father indulges his wife, as only a rich husband could afford, I expect. Her dresses, both on and off the court, are beautifully made and fabulously expensive, costing more than a year of a doctor’s salary, certainly doctors who are unlucky enough to find themselves working in this establishment, I expect. Anyway, Mama is a woman who enjoys being spoilt, and father enjoys spoiling her, so she would be, as he would be, furious to hear me even hint of her extravagance, I expect. She has simply never learned the value of money, and she never will now, I expect.
There is something odd about all I’m telling you, in strictest confidence of course. Have you noticed? I’m certain you have, I’m sure you are sharp as a knife. You are remarking on how sure I am this is summertime, and if it is so, why am I stuck in a room? It is a room, isn’t it? And I live in a hotel, don’t I?
A hotel that is not quite so grand compared to where my mother lodges on her travels through Europe, but I am, as always, content with my lot and do not envy her a life of wandering from one capital to another, eating, sleeping, causing riot and havoc, blasting tennis balls to kingdom come if that should help her triumph in the games she plays, rounding up innocent and guilty to come and watch as she decrees they should, applauding, cheering when they’re told, the mob obeying as she demands they do. As far away as I am in rural France, I can see here the havoc she creates when she decides to visit and destroy wherever her heart’s desire leads her. A noisy woman, a strange woman indeed, but not a dancer. Dear me, no.
That was the first thing my teacher observed about her and told me immediately. Mama overheard and was furious. She went into quite a frenzy, as could be her wont. I had seen her in a temper before – hadn’t we all? But this was of an exceptional violence.
My instructor, a frail lady, who now walked only by aid of a cane, was clearly in fear of her life and really had to defend herself as best she could with that cane against my mother’s pushing and kicking, while screaming blue murder in a language I did not know, nor could I make any effort to have her calm down until an idea struck me. I might turn on Mama with all the ferocity she herself was summoning from whatever source inside her and I should direct these exertions towards her so that, physically, she could concentrate her attack on someone other than the old ballerina.
It worked, but here’s the weird thing. As she lashed out against me, people came running to her defence, holding me back, and when they succeeded in doing so, from their behaviour towards me, I was regarded as the sole villain of the piece, mauling my mother, her brutal assault on a woman who was herself a fragile remnant from an earlier age, that was quite forgotten, and when I looked to this delicate soul for confirmation of what had happened and that I was only doing my best to protect her, hadn’t she vanished into thinnest air, leaving me without a witness to testify why I’d had to stoop to these impetuous blows and put an end to Mama’s antics?
She was clever enough to deny all to my father and brother, so they were suspicious of me, suggesting that maybe I should stop going to these classes as they might be exhausting and making me conduct myself in such outlandish fashion as they now accused me of behaving.
What would you have me do then for exercise? I challenged her, play tennis like you? Like me? What are you talking about? she dared ask.
You well know what. I let her understand she was not to take me for a fool, the whole world is aware that tennis is how you’ve chosen to waste your life – neglecting us, your children, discarding the needs of my father, all to satisfy your vanity and be acclaimed for your athletic brilliance on the courts.
The tennis courts? I heard her repeating, where I have never set foot in my entire life. I can no longer deal with this, I cannot take this insanity a moment longer, if your father will not confront it and do what must be done, Archie, will you take charge and save your sister’s life, and spare what’s left of your mother’s sanity? I swear it is running out, second by second, as we speak. Did you hear what she says about me – a tennis champion? Where under Jesus does she get these notions from? There’s only one source, and he’s there sitting on a chair, listening to all this, and I swear he’s smiling. What’s there to smile at? What’s the fun in this? How can you laugh at your mad daughter?
I would not give Mama the satisfaction of proving her right by lifting the nearest object and hurling it hard in her direction, although you would agree her outburst sorely tempted me to do so. But like my father, I am a creature of graceful restraint, and so I merely smiled and nodded in his direction. She does this to infuriate me, my mother said, they both do, sending secret signals, one to the other, but I will not give in to the temptation they put before me. I will ignore them, as they deserve.
I’m smiling because it amuses me how our daughter sometimes can access my dreams, Father explained, and this tennis – anchoring you to a tennis court, seeing you there, well, it’s as if we have stumbled on the same connection, for you, my dear, have often come to me in my sleep as the great French player, Suzanne Lenglen, La Divine. You are where our daughter’s agility, her speed, her flamboyance come from, and no mistake.
La Divine? That is who you think I am? No, I don’t think so, she said, not that, not in dreams, but in reality a laugh, a mockery, a dirty great Galway sow, fit only to be prodded and poked by you pair that see me as being there for your ridicule and a good time had by all who came to the party to jeer. Are you proud of yourselves? Proud? he repeated. Are you happy that all your brains let you do is sneer at me, a woman who’s done neither of you any wrong? Suzanne Lenglen, is that what you make of me? she asked, but they did not reply.
A woman too busy showing her legs, Mama continued, and her arse to the nations of the world to be considered as anything other than a word I won’t stain my soul using, since in this family there are too many souls – well, there’s certainly one – stinking to high heaven, looking for punishment to be rained down on his head and the heads of any tragic enough to call him their own. Laugh on, laugh on, it will soon be on the other side of your face.
She was very upset, my mother. There would be no denying that.
Perhaps that is why she has not yet paid me a visit. But she will come soon. I am certain she has not forgotten me. She prides herself that we both have ferocious memories. And my brother, he can recall, he claims, the day he was born. That, you know, is an affliction to bear as much as forgetfulness.
I was married once, or nearly so, to an Irishman, a Dubliner, and he too was stricken with the plague of seeing everything, hearing everything, tasting – touching – smelling everything. What became of him? I wonder. Does he ask ever, What became of her? Her, me – what is the difference? This, he told me, was the kind of question he most liked to pose, but I could tell what he really desired, and that was to see me piss.
I declined to satisfy this proclivity, but not without much persuasion from this gentleman that this was a habit customary in his neck of the woods. You mean, I asked, in Dublin men are inclined to spy on ladies relieving themselves in what they imagine to be the privacy of their bathroom, but which are in fact more open to the world than the most squalid pissoirs? No, not through the whole of Dublin, but in certain suburbs it is the fashion, he assured me, most especially his own, Foxrock, a highly desirable quarter that houses some of the best families associated with the Church of Ireland or the Royal Bank, architects and dentists also being most welcome within this salubrious vicinity.
Someday I must take you there, he suggested, but I declined firmly, and none too politely.
Do I strike you as the kind of woman who might indulge another’s perversions? I asked. He defended himself from any such charge of indecency, claiming a fascination with the urinary tracts of females was a winning aspect of any normal man who liked his fair share of female flesh sourly scented with her own waste material.
Call me old-fashioned and a tad too attuned to the riddles of the Irish, but I could see clearly enough where this paradox was leading, and I was determined to halt the conversation between us. I do not care for normal men then, if that is how they court the opposite sex, I retorted, give me a pervert – or a pervert in your eyes anyway – on all romantic occasions. I shall bear that in mind, he informed me. Do, I encouraged him, and perhaps you might let the people of Foxrock reconsider what they judge to be decent behaviour as it is conducted between members of the opposite sex. There is no opposite sex in Foxrock, he let me know, there are only windows. Widows? I asked him, only widows? Has there been a war, or some epidemic, that only carried off the male of the species? I said. Windows, not widows, he instructed me, I made no mention of widows, though we have our fair share of them, and not one has ever been burned alive, to the best of my knowledge, but I could stand corrected, he admitted.
Burned? The widows? I asked, who would encourage such barbarity? The Hindus have a form of ceremony that corresponds, he instructed me, I believe they call it suttee, but I hesitate to describe our ways in similar terms. Why? I wanted to know. I mistakenly thought, he admitted, it was Foxrock’s way of saluting its tribute to the British presence in India. So many of our residents held sway on that part of the Asian subcontinent. My childhood memories are replete with umbrellas of all shades standing desolately in a hollowed-out elephant’s foot. I used imagine the brollies come to life and charge through the princely residences of our village, goring my enemies to death with their powerful tusks, staining their ivory red. But this was simply not the case. There were other, less obvious reasons to fear fire in Foxrock.
He enlightened me why. Something remarkably similar to suttee had happened a few years before he was born, so although he had no direct recollection of the event, it had caused sufficient scandal to be talked about, the pros and cons weighed, the right and wrong of the matter settled, or questioned, for years.
He was reluctant to call the event by its Hindu name, for this self-consummation involved a woman, a Catholic, yes, but not a widow. No, this individual had prepared and set herself alight on her own funeral pyre. Her reasons for committing this apparently unhinged act were made quite clear in a letter she left behind to account for this more than a little bizarre exploit. She hated her husband, and this was her rather extreme way of being rid of him. He’d long been a disgrace to his own family, his father a quantity surveyor, and his mother, of saintly disposition, a nurse. Their son had travelled throughout Ireland, using the alias of the Sheik of Araby, to save bringing disrepute on the more rational members of his kith and kin. His act involved conjuring magic tricks. All the time he accompanied himself with mouth music that he claimed to have been taught to him in Arabia by a master of the Eastern Arts, calligraphy and falconry being his particular areas of expertise.
No one ever saw the Sheik tame as much as a robin, so the latter practice had to be taken as assumed. His handwriting scrawled in so many directions a career as a schoolmaster was out of the question, but it may be such a style perfectly accommodated the beauties of the Arabic alphabet, maybe ever stretching to a proficiency in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Who can tell? Suffice to say a neighbour well-versed in the intricacies of Ireland’s hidden cultures identified the sounds emitted from the Sheik’s mouth while in a trance, performing his bag of tricks. They were ascertained to be nothing but a form of singing once common enough in the parts of the island where Gaelic is spoken and identified as sean-nós, meaning old style, providing much noise and little pleasure.
Confronted with proof of his deception that he hailed from royal, oriental blood, that in short he had faked his name, his career and his art, the so-called Sheik of Araby declared it an outrage to have been so uncovered and humiliated, he would thus abandon Dublin and go to live in a cave near Athlone. His poor wife had endured much through her nomadic life with this reckless vagabond, but the threat of Athlone, and she knew whereof she spoke, provoked her into choosing a hideous death by self-immolation, welcoming the hungry flames licking her to hell, since suicide was a mortal sin.
Yet was it suicide? The very fact she chose and conducted such an elaborate method of exterminating herself, well, did that not betoken a mind that made its decision in a detailed, perfectly logical fashion? Others argued passionately that the very violence of her exit was sign she had surely taken utter leave of her senses, and the poor dear must not be condemned for her own reckless execution. For God’s sake, pity her.
That was the response, by and large, among the Protestant side of the tribe in Foxrock, but of course in Ireland, no matter where you point the finger, you’ll find the opposite view in some form or other to some degree, small or large, and in this case, as in so many, things were complicated by the fact the woman herself was Catholic. The long and the short of this all came down then to one deeply contested fact – not was she in her right mind when she set a match to the paraffin, but by writing that letter in her own hand, abandoning her spouse, was it divorce and not suicide she was seeking?
Well, her people knew where they stood on that issue. And the consensus was total. The slut insulted the truth of her faith. No room for doubt. She was not to be forgiven. Not our way. And the populace agreed her ashes be denied burial in the waters of the River Liffey or any of its tributaries, or indeed the wide expanse of the Irish Sea itself. Let that be a lesson to all sinners who would defy the sacred oath of the marriage vows. The Sheik of Araby – he continued with the old, assumed name, out of grief – he was complaining he found himself at a serious loss as to what then to do with her remains. For pure convenience he’d kept the ashes in that elephant’s foot mentioned earlier, together with a circumference of umbrellas.
What became of her dust, he couldn’t say for sure, but it was rumoured that when they built a Roman Catholic Church in Foxrock, her spirit haunted it, laughing uproariously at inappropriate moments of the Mass, particularly in funeral services.
The stories of my lover’s youth were, more or less, all like this, obsessed with death and ghosts, and here’s another strange detail about them, if bloody parasols or brollies in general did not feature, then you can be quite assured ladders will. We had arranged to go out walking one afternoon, and then drink tea in a sweet little establishment my father had been asked to leave for insulting the honour of France by farting deliberately at the mere mention of Joan of Arc, claiming he heard voices in the explosion, whose they were he was not allowed to reveal at the behest of the Saviour. Out – out, the owners demanded. But he finished his tea, stole a saucer and did not pay the bill. Such nerve, that wonderful man. Will he come and visit me? This word he is dying, it’s lies. How can he be put in the earth, when he is the earth? Is that not what he has told me, in our secret way, and I have believed it to be gospel truth? Father, wake up, sing – sing ‘The Sheik of Araby’.
When you’re asleep – sleep, sleep. Into your tent, I’ll creep – creep, creep. Wake up, father. I have to tell you this story, about your acolyte, about his habit of walking the streets of Paris hauling a ladder after him and why he does so. His answer surprised me. While some do like to bring their children or dogs, even their cats and lobsters, out for a stroll, he brought a ladder for the exercise of carrying it, and for the company of its conversation. Are you telling me two things? I inquired. First is it always the same ladder we are talking about? And if it is, secondly, do you regard this object as some sort of companion?
He confirmed, yes, it was indeed identical, always the same one, but declined to be so definite as to why it was frequently in his presence. Companion – well, it sounded not quite right. Too intimate? Perhaps. And yet he had come to depend on this ladder as a comfort much as one would a beloved pet that stands close by in times of need. Do you have a particular reason for bringing it with us on the day that’s in it? I demanded to know. Yes, I do, he softly whispered, as a romantic gesture, I would like us to climb the Eiffel Tower.
There are times that individual knows exactly the way to my heart. Had I somehow, somewhere, let slip that this artifice, this miracle of French engineering, this most elegant masterpiece, I have long adored it as an object of brilliant genius? Ask me what it is I most covet in the great city of Paris. It is not the prized tapestries of the Virgin and the Unicorn in the Musée de Cluny, although as a child I did see a unicorn in a field – where was it? Normandy, a little village called Boisny – but on investigation it proved to be nothing more than a pedlar’s goat, milked near to extinction to sate his permanent thirst and offered to us to buy for the price of a bottle of wine and a plate of venison stew? We declined the offer, my parents did, despite the protestation of Archie and myself. He put me in here, in this hotel, my brother. Why? Perhaps in revenge that I informed him his precious unicorn was nothing more than a shitty farmyard beast.
No, not the Cluny and all its treasures, these I would decline, as I would the grave of Napoleon, and all the silks and laces of the ladies wandering serenely through the Sundays of the racecourse at Longchamp, nervous as newborn fillies, highly strung like my good self, in most urgent need of minding. I would reject the delicate motorcars that could be most severely crushed by collision with their own like or swerving suddenly to miss a pack of cackling geese sauntering down a country road in the Auvergne, never feeling such speed or causing such mayhem, bloodied as the bodies, headless in the Vendée, priests, nuns, bishops, chopped to little pieces fed to fatten the pigs, the goats, the unicorns of the district.
Then what about Chardin, painter of the ordinary, rendering it sublime? Look at the boy building a tower of playing cards; one feel, one breath, it falls apart, as he and all his works will when age touches him? None of these has my heart, my soul. I declare allegiance only to the Eiffel Tower.
Why? Because I firmly maintain that in another life I built it. This feat is all the more remarkable when you consider that now, as in my past, I suffered most painfully from fear of heights. A robust dashing young peasant fellow as I was then, I had made my way – from Boisny again – to stake my claim and gain a fortune in Paris. My mother’s tears blessed me as I left our hovel, and she cried out in warning after me, remember you can barely stand on a chair without fainting, you take after my side of the family, do not forget you are terrified–
I blocked out what she specified my terror was, for if truth be told, everything was foreign and frightening to me in this great city, where I found employment in the construction of Monsieur Eiffel’s great work. It must have been the life for me, certainly it removed all traces of vertigo, for I lasted in the job and I have not the slightest recollections of panic as I ascended into the sky, erecting this most beautiful of structures, sure of my footing to the extent that I could watch workers tumble to their death and not blink an eyelid nor feel the slightest tremor of alarm, but instead blessed them and wished their souls to heaven.
So much of my life in that time, it is dark as night to me and I do not like to probe its mysteries too deeply, since I have trouble enough with my own sanity as things now stand, but I know why I experience such affection for the tower and the man who entrusted me when I was a young boy to construct it, taking from me the paralysing sense I would never climb as high as I might have dreamt I could.
Then I died and turned into a girl, my career as a labourer was over. I told no one about my secret life, although I think my father guessed what kind of workman I had been. Why else would he tell me filthy songs and stories strong enough to churn my stomach? Why else would he give me his taste for kidneys or tripe and onions? Why else would he confess in drink, for my ears only to hear, the way his father forced his mother to do her duty, when she could barely talk after childbirth, let alone walk? Why else would he tell me his father loved to suckle his wife’s breasts, stroking her arse, calling her Mammy? Why else would he teach me the sacred oaths, to keep always under my breath, that a man could call a woman but never in her hearing, unless he wished permanent banishment from her bed? Why else but that he, and he alone, saw the shadow of the cock between my legs and cared for me as the son my brother failed to be?
Why did I start calling those terrible names at Mama and keep on repeating them, turning every inch of her pale with shock, as she well realised who it was could alone teach me them to punish her as he did when they fucked? Did the young man carrying the ladder hoping we’d climb the Eiffel Tower, did he have – could he have any notion of this? I’d say not, but who knows?
All and sundry were staring at us, him, me and the ladder sauntering through Paris, the three of us. I might have forgotten what our purpose was, had he not asked me in his usual manner of wanting to know more on the subject of my father, what was Papa’s opinion, did I know, of the Tower – marvel or monstrosity? This could not be allowed to pass without a bit of sport to entertain myself. I told him that while I had no knowledge about my father in this respect, my mother had expressed her opinion in no uncertain terms. It would be fair to say this did not spark a rush of interest. Still, I let him in on the fact that she found it a bit of an eyesore, and not a patch on what she’d seen as a girl in Connaught, or more specifically Connemara. He did not have the good grace to wonder what that might be, so I had to enlighten him it was not an architectural nor mathematical extravagance, but a monument, another kind of monument to the millions who lost their lives starving in the Irish Famine. And it consisted only of skulls, heaps and heaps and heaps of skulls reaching up into the sky, polished white by the rain and sleet and snow of Galway winters than which there never were damper nor hasher, as if these dead took their revenge through inflicting this most savage climate.
He believed me. Papa, he did. Would that not leave you laughing your arse out? Would that not have you splitting your sides and spitting tobacco? Would that not drive you to drink and put a giddy-on to your gallop? At the news of this, would you not notice the earth spinning and the moon colliding? Would you credit that was the end of the world, for I never set eyes on him or the ladder or the Eiffel Tower again? I must have somehow shamed him and his breed, his lock, stock and barrel, his bones, his bible, the faith of his fathers, that did next to nothing to remedy the suffering Irish a century ago, and he knew it. Hadn’t I behaved like my mother’s daughter, and he left me for it. And when I informed her of this, did she thank me for my loyalty? Did she pity me for my loss? When I told her I had proved myself odd as Aunt Gertie with her arse out the window so no man would marry me and I’d be marooned alone, did she comfort me with sweet assurances I was a beautiful girl that fellows would die for and that children would flow from me?
If she did, I could not hear her. Instead I saw the look she exchanged with my brother, and to my grief, I knew she hates me, aye, this woman hates me, and for why? Because I was born.
Forgive me, Mama – do. Come and visit me. Why does she not? Was it because I called her names? I will not do that again. I promise. I keep my promise, as I was taught to do. I put away my toys. I chew my food. I am an exceptionally obedient child. A very, very well behaved girl. And my fiancé, he used tell me, he used to be my fiancé, I am beautiful. All dancers are. All dancers are cracked. A bit cracked. Like an egg.
I remember eggs. For years, she would make me eat one. Boiling it in scalding water. Cracking open its gentle shell, then leaving it to stand, white and naked. The sharpest knife in our house cuts it in pieces and she shovels it – she always says that – shovels it – into my cup where butter waits to be melted into the beautiful smell. Then she fetches my favourite spoon – the littlest one with a man crossed-armed at its top, an apostle she calls him – and feeds me, making sure I swallow every mouthful. And as I break my fast, she tells me the names of Galway, the Claddagh and Taylor’s Hill, Nun’s Island and Eyre Square, towns with lovely sounds like Spiddal and Oughterard, Moycullen and Rahoon, which is when she always stops, repeating Rahoon, Rahoon, Rahoon, and some days she cries.
When I was old enough to notice her tears, I asked her why, one day. Because at this minute, she told me straight, I would like to go home, because I am tired in my bones, tired of your father and all he’s made me do, though Christ knows I was willing to be out of and far away from that nest of vipers, Ireland, but he sometimes forgets how much I sacrificed to do his bidding. I left behind my family, my faith, my home town, my heart that is breaking to see again where I belong, the girls all dark and Spanish, the black-haired fellows, beautiful, to take your breath away and put it back again, their tongues in your mouth, tasting your tonsils, the shower of them, good for only one thing, thanks be to Christ and his crucified mother – didn’t she suffer what he suffered? For they are the best at it above all men from other nations or cities of the earth. Well, so they like to tell you, and my arse is parsley. Eat up your eggs, it’s Easter Day, finish it for luck. I’ve sourced some lamb, and for your father I will roast it to perfection.
She did so, but always ran herself down as a cook. Whatever else he sees in me, she would ever tell strangers, it’s not because I am a dab hand with the grub. No, she fed us as best she could, and I would not fault her food, were she not in the business of trying to poison me. My father tried to talk me out of what he called – what was it? Bad thoughts? No, nor mad either, but what he described as dreams, mad dreams, nightmares that came from nowhere and I must not believe in them, for they would take me from them, carry me away, and I might not come back from where they led me.
She would simply not tolerate such nonsense, as she called it, from me no more than she would allow anything be wasted that could be put in your mouth and swallowed. But I will grow fat, I protested. What – fat as me? she snarled. I would not give her the satisfaction of rising to her bait. Instead I declared that I was in on her plan to kill me. How will I do that? she demanded. You will eat me alive, I told her, you will dine on my flesh, and you will serve it to my father and my brother. It will turn my father into a woman, for you will only serve him my breast and a slice of my anus. He will relish the smell of it and devour it, not noticing, in his delight, his knob is no more. You will stuff into Archie’s mouth my elbow, my eyes – and here’s what’s best of all, that’s when he will at long last start seeing you for what you are, Mama, a cannibal from Connemara, where Father says they eat their young out of starvation and where you say you picked up the habit of disembowelling.
I don’t observe you too deficient in bodily parts, she retorted, and that is when I took that knife – the sharpest in the house – and heard her scream I was going to stab her.
Not a bit of it. I simply asked my father and my brother if they would like to shave me between my legs and make cufflinks or a tiepin out of my silver down? Was it silver or gold? Was it a strange alloy of both? Do you know I can’t tell you, for it has been years now since I probed in that secret place where unborn babies lie unhatched waiting for the greatest of the gods to visit and ravish me in the shape of some bull or bird or other, depending on his mood.
Had I a choice, which would I prefer? A bull, when I feel my mother hold sway within me, and my blood has all the hunger of the men of Connaught, longing to be satisfied up their arses by eleven inches of ivory stolen from a temple on the Nile dedicated to the goddess Isis so as to satisfy the lust of Queen Victoria, the harlot. A bird, when I feel my father caress me with his wing, feathered, his down the soft roughness of Donegal tweed, and I would let him ravish me if only to be assured he can take the form of a god, for they must not be judged by the rules of human contact.
He must not be judged, my father. He must be eternally extolled, my father. Who is it I see bestride the colossus of my cunt but my father? Where dragons lurch breathing my mother’s fire, who is my protector but my father? Where thieves lie in wait to ambush and divest me of my armour, who is my champion, only my father? If the skies were to open and great Zeus himself threaten to burn me to a cinder, who will be my shield? Yes, my father. When my brother drinks himself into sour stupor, who burns with righteous anger at his son’s strangeness? My father, my father. Who reads to me arcane secrets buried in the earth’s frozen wastes? My father. Who will take my hand and lead me from this exile back to where my chosen people long for me, surely? It must be my father. You cannot lie there, spent, dead to the world, waiting only for death, in that lonely bed, for that is what I do, father. Get up, get up and see your daughter, my father. See yourself in her and save the two of us. Here I’ll place a knife – the sharpest in our house – place it in your hand. What will you do with it?
It is Easter Day, and he carved the lamb. Our neighbours eat goose, fatty, smelly goose, laying eggs on their table, eggs for luck, if you were to believe their lies, and we never do. Though it is sweetly herbed and cooked as we all like it, the lamb sheds its blood beneath my father’s knife. Red trickles on our plates, and we would lick them clean, loving blood, still we are not savage but civilised beings who know what to do at table, and so we use white bread to lap the liquid, consecrated offering, who could it be possibly grows annoyed at this? Perhaps it is myself. I eat a morsel and wash it down with a mouthful of wine. Good wine. My father’s choice, an excellent vintage. He toasts my mother, my brother, myself. I down another bite. I swallow the staff of life. My mother compliments me on my appetite.
I let this pass without looking at her, without speaking back, without touching her foul skin, tasting her fetid breath, for I have, as they say, other fish to fry since I now know what is happening inside my belly. The lamb is growing back into its living shape. I can feel it sniff my internal organs – heart and spleen, kidneys and lungs – rejecting, mercifully, to dine on my body, but I know it needs water, so I quench its thirst with water, loads of water, a basin full, a lough full if necessary.
Was there too much salt on the beast? She’ll drink the city dry, my mother notices. At last I smile, and she is relieved I am not, as she now says so often, having one on my turns. I let her lose her panic and then I say, May I ask if we have in the kitchen any grass? I would like to eat some grass. Why? my brother asks. Why not? my mother answers, how long has she been waiting to spring that surprise? Isn’t it only right and fitting that she should look for hay – no, maybe she should be more demanding and insist on the flowers of the fields, because there we can oblige her.
She plucks lilies from their vase. A cup of primroses is poured in front of me. I am only sorry, she laments, that our bill of fare cannot stretch to more exotic blooms, but there it is, the time of year defeats us, so I trust she will forgive us, little Miss Bo Peep here, and the herd of sheep who, if I may hazard a guess and I think I will be correct since I am getting wise to her little ways, the flock that now feeds inside her – am I right? Of course I am. They are hungry, they want grass, the green grass of Erin, you could sing that if you put a tune to it, and Jesus, am I sick to the tonsils of listening to your refrains. Will they never cease? Will you ever give it a rest? If you confound me for the delight of doing so, has it not now dawned on you I am up to each and every one of your devices and I fall for none of them? Has that not at last hit you?
The chair I was sitting on was sturdy. I could feel it bear my weight, and it was as if its wood became part of what most turned my stomach against myself and this woman who bore me. Its legs, its arms – silent, static. I was waiting for them to do something, do anything. They did not disappoint me, for the next thing was they had jerked me – hurled me perhaps more correctly – to my feet with such force I nearly felt my head beating against the wall opposite, and I let out an almighty roar that could wake the dead if I or they were so inclined to believe in resurrections, the day that was, as I said, in it.
On my feet I stopped swaying before my brother reached me, and that damned unmannerly chair, that wonderful chair, what did it do next but leap from the floor straight into my arms. Whatever force propelled it must have been powered by fire, for I could sense it scorching me, burning a hole through me, and it was absolutely necessary that I by some superhuman effort – it now weighed more than my brother – toss it away from me in whatever direction it decided to fly. Was it really any surprise it should find my mother’s face? Should any have been shocked that the chair screamed, You have long had this coming? For your arse, sitting on top of me, smelling as it does of rancid lard, for all your cruelty, for your neglect, for your hatred, fuck you. Do you not deserve this magic when the furniture, the very chairs in your house, would throttle you, if they had a chance? Now, given it, they will teach you a lesson you will never forget, Mama, never, never ever.
No, I won’t, that’s all she said, nor will you, she added, and my brother took me away from the table, in case it too sided with me against this terrible woman.
Commit her, I heard her tell my father, have her committed, or commit me, she asked.
And still he said nothing.
For a man so versed in the wisdom of all words, a mind so fashioned according to all the most elaborate and illuminating schemes of things – he was more than the author, he was the book itself that passes understanding, and only he and I knew such things – my father was my father was my father, I expect. In this instance he could be no more than my father. So what was done had to be done, and, as they say in Ballyhaunis, remove her immediately from the field of play. I have never been to Ballyhaunis, but I was removed. Bag, baggage and ladder to this spot where you find me, and my fiancé did not come to save me.
If he did, I wonder would he notice the old woman who sometimes sits in the same room as I do? Would he find out who she might be? It is not my mother – I’d recognise her. Far gone I may be, but not that far gone. She smokes incessantly, and her voice is harsh. I sometimes have great difficulty deciphering what she says. Are you Irish? That was one of her first questions. I am when I’m not, and I’m not when I am, I answered, hoping this riddle would put a stop to that one’s gallop. I cannot fathom you at all there, she said, but I think I know what you’re up to, talking in such fashion. Is this a way of making strange with me?
That’s an expression baffles me, I told her, I have not the slightest notion what you mean. Indeed and you do, she declared, wasn’t it often said about you when you were a child, frightened of strangers, crying to be taken from them, happy only in your parents’ arms? Am I right? Is that not what is meant by making strange? If it is, I told her, it’s still new to me, but how would you know what way I conducted myself as an infant?
That would be telling, she confused me, and isn’t it best not to say a word when you don’t know who’s listening, and what it is they want to hear? She clammed up then and lit her cigarette from the one that was burning between her fingers, stamping it out with her black, flat shoe on the ground. You’ll have to forgive me sitting here keeping you company, puffing the hours away, she admitted, as you’ve noticed I couldn’t be without tobacco. It’s the life of me. An awful habit I know, but don’t we all succumb to it, smoking like chimneys, women like ourselves, light on our feet, up on our toes, dancers, a breed apart?
Is that what you are? I wanted to know. It’s what I used to be, she replied, until the weight, the aches, the pains, the hump on my back, the rheum in my eyes – they all conspired to still me. Now, if I could put one foot in front of the other, I’d try to convince myself I was stepping out onstage with the Russian imperial ballet, ready to execute the most fastidious of steps, all for the glory of the men who loved me. Tell me, have you ever been so loved?
I felt such interrogation the height of impertinence and strongly considered passing on giving even the most cursory reply, but there was something about this old doll and the way she used her compact mirror to powder her face, holding it at such an angle that my own reflection slipped into the side of her glass, I felt for some reason honour bound to let her know that yes, I had been loved.
I suppose you know, I informed her, that beyond these walls there’s a war raging, spreading havoc through all the nations of Europe, blighting this generation and all others that will succeed it? I have a passing knowledge of such matters, she replied, cool as a cucumber stripped of its skin and its seeds, dressed in the proper manner, reeking of cider vinegar – the only way my father would deign to digest such a vegetable. A passing knowledge? I mocked her gently, I compliment your powers of selective hearing, my good lady, since the rest of the continent is rife with rumours of horrors being committed that none can comprehend – why have armies sunk to such brutalities against their fellow humans?
I know well what’s being done out there, she let me know, how could I not when olive trees are shedding blood from their leaves, the birds of the air abandon their songs, and the silence, that silence, drives me into these four high walls, that I might block my ears to the infinite weeping of those born to die too young, too young, too young like yourself.
That’s where you’re wrong, I corrected her, I am not dying. I only have your word for this, she replied, I would need more concrete proof. Then are you prepared to hear and believe my deepest secret? I threatened. No, she said, for I have been well warned against you and your powers of lying. Did you not make a mockery of a poor Dublin lad from the wilds of the village of Foxrock, demanding in return for your hand he fetch you all the bricks used to construct the Eiffel Tower? No bricks were used, I defended myself. Didn’t he learn that the hard way, as all do who are touched by us? she hinted. But I missed the clue and heard only what she continued to reveal as she informed me this was how you lost him, this mockery, this was why he tossed to one side any desire to wed you, but in place of that, he pursued your father in hope of marrying him. He was rejected by that good man in deference to you, his daughter. Are you proud of yourself?
That is none of your business, but I must insist, I told her, insist you tell me how you know so much about me and my past. Your present and your future too, she added, if truth be told.
So you can tell me what will befall, you are a seer, a prophetess, is that what you’re now claiming? I asked her, and she nodded her head, saying nothing. How do you know me? I repeated. Because I am your vassal, your serf, your slave, you have won me in the war, isn’t that why it’s being fought? She challenged me, most fiercely. And it was then I convinced myself she had me rumbled.
How are you certain that the world is in convulsions because of me? I demanded she tell. They speak of nothing else in Poland, she whispers. I have never been there, I let her know. In Russia, in Estonia, mothers pray to your icon, she admits. I have never been painted, I let her know that as well. Your face adorns a million walls in Germany, she tells me. And it is most cruelly mocked by the addition of a moustache, is it not? I question her. England’s king abandons the realm for the sake of a woman, she confides. Is she me? I want to know. Yes, she sighs. When has this all happened? I demand an answer. While you were sleeping, locked in this castle, she tells me, waiting for your father. To come and rescue me? I inquire. No, waiting for him to die, and he will die, she assures me.
This is when I hear a scream that shakes me to the core, but herself sitting opposite, this hideous old fool, it does not take a wrinkle out of her, although she is more lined, more ancient than the Rock of Gibraltar, and all she says is my name, Beatrice, Beatrice, is that right? Am I guessing correctly? Do you know why I may have stumbled on this? But I refused to answer. I will not fall for that familiar ruse as a way of humiliating me.
Once, in school, every girl in my classroom claimed that she was called Beatrice, either at birth or as a term of endearment. It was too ridiculous for words, this apparent coincidence, and I refused to believe them, so they called out to our teacher, letting her know I was calling them liars, demanding was I the only one among them with the right to bear the name? She is showing off again, they chorus, she is trying to be different. And so I must be punished. How?
Is it to be tied to this place for eternity listening to the endless prattle of an old fool as she sits choking herself to death – it could not come quickly enough – urging me to take on board the minutiae of her existence, as if such details conformed to a marked measure with those that go to make up my own story? Or is that another matter entirely?
I should ask the nurse when she fetches my dinner, but I’m not sure if I speak her dialect of French, or indeed if she is not herself deaf and dumb, for she never does anything nor says one civilised word of conversation, but grunts instead as if I were an animal. Perhaps I am an animal – she knows something I do not. What kind? Might she let me in on the secret of what she sees or indeed smells in me? A camel or kangaroo? A bear or a gazelle?
No, never a gazelle, I have grown too lame to be that, and my dancing days are over. But I clearly have about me the stench of the farmyard. That is why they feed me such volumes of pig. Every meal of fat is forced down my gullet. There are nights in dreams I imagine I am growing a snout. Complain, you would say – insist on fruit and vegetables. Plead for even a little wing of chicken. But such things are beyond me now, for I feel my days are numbered. Ask the ancient fool sitting opposite me to earn her keep and let her do the necessary – finish me off, but she won’t. I notice she can guzzle as good as the rest of them, but there I run into difficulty, for it appears no one can actually see this bygone relic but myself, and there is great reluctance to admit she dwells amongst us. Once upon a time we could have smuggled her into our daily existence, in the days before rationing and shortage, but not now when it is necessary to be somebody in case they come looking for whatever tribe takes their fancy for disposal, depending on your luck, good and bad.
I explained this complicated situation to her – or at least I made some attempt but she halted me, waving me into silence. It is not at all complicated, she smiled, the brute fact is I come and go as I please. We are under lock and key here, I retaliated. Not me, I’m not, she was now positively beaming, you may be, but I am under special dispensation, so I am permitted to open doors without a key, walk through walls as if they were carved from mere gossamer, and should I feel confined, then the roof itself will let me ascend through its beams and slates, if straw is no longer the fashion. There is, my dear, she tells me, an obvious reason why they cannot see me – frequently I am not there. The consequence is you are regarded as what, I believe, in legal terms, is all too often dismissed as an unreliable witness. Irritating, it must be, the only consolation is that I believe you – I know you always tell things as you see they are. In short you are a girl who tells the truth, and that is why I visit you.
Will you tell my mother? I plead with her, will you tell her to come and see me? Bring my brother. Bring my father.
She cannot do that. He is much too ill. In the hospital, in Zurich. Miles away. That is where they all are. It is safe there. In the mountains. In the lakes. In the rivers. In the snow. Is it snowing in his room, my father’s? Does the snow come through the window, falling on his bed, and does he think it is white as a cat, or a rabbit, coming to take his soul? I would like to be my daddy’s girl and hear him singing lullabies. Or he could tell me silly stories about the neighbours who surrounded them in his dear old dirty Dublin.
Tell me, Papa, about Kitty Maguire. Kitty Maguire sat on the fire, the fire was too hot, she sat on the pot, the pot was too round, she sat on the ground, the ground was too flat, she sat on the cat, and the cat ran away – the cat ran away – the cat ran – where did the cat run? Do you not know? Does he not know? Why aren’t you speaking? Why is she crying, my mother? Why are you crying, Archie?
In this house we have built from the weapons of our words, why is there silence? Will this mean that our walls fall asunder? Will our windows crack and our doors fall open – close the door, darken the windows, that’s what’s done in Galway, isn’t it, Mama? That’s how we free his spirit – or do they do the opposite? Unbolt everything, draw back the snib. Let it fly from us, his soul. No, cast nets and catch it, hold him to our breast, get up from the grave, Papa, throw off the soil of earth, rise, man, and give us a bit of your blather, dazzle us with the dirt you’ve gathered on high and low, let your soul magnify, fill the hungry with plenty, protect Israel, your servant – is it over, is he breathing?
She’s back, the old witch. Yes, he’s breathing, she tells me. Where were you? I ask her. Near enough, she teases. Are you sure? I quiz her. Positive, she informs me. How can you be so? I wonder. I took a mirror, would you credit this? she wonders. I held it before his mouth. And did you see his breath on the glass? I demanded. No, she said, I saw his face, its reflection, and here’s the strange thing, should I tell you? I nodded my head, and she did so. I saw not his face, but my face, and when it clearly was my face, did it not turn into your face as you are now, as you were as a girl, as an infant, and as an infant I saw him in you, beckoning us all to come to him, as we do now in Zurich, gathering from all parts, getting here by hook or by crook, war or no war, boat and train and bicycle, ship and plane, some by the power of their two feet, or landing on stout wings, prompting a shout from your mother when she saw this miracle, she told us the man was an angel, qualifying her sense of awe by remembering that so too was Lucifer.
Tell her I laughed at that. Tell her it was funny. Tell her Father would have loved she thought of saying something comical as her heart was torn out of her. Tell her in my own way I made sure I saw what was happening in the room. Tell her I won’t believe he’s dead until I hear it from her own lips.
Tell her I want to see them move, saying, Your father has died.
Tell her. Tell her.