May 2019, Clooneven
Jessie
It was Tuesday. Or maybe it was Wednesday. After three weeks at home, Jessie had lost track of the days. As she walked along the prom, the evening sky was streaked with neon. Waves curled and fizzed to the shore. Two boys, who looked to be in their early teens, sat on a bench smoking a joint, the smell a reminder of her other life, the life she hoped would be hers again soon. She was about to take out her cigarettes when she spotted a familiar figure pacing in her direction. He was wearing a GAA tracksuit top and loose-fitting jeans. His dark hair was longer than the last time they’d met and his face slightly thinner. Otherwise, he appeared unchanged.
Between the ages of four and eighteen, she’d seen Ger Dillane almost every day. They’d been in the same class at St Finian’s national school, studied the same Leaving Cert subjects and jumped around at the same teenage discos. If memory served, they’d once shared a fumble at the back of the arcade. It had been during the free-for-all of her Leaving Cert summer when her class had been determined to explore all available options. They’d told themselves that if quality was out of reach, they would have to settle for quantity. Jessie remembered that summer with fondness. The one low note had been provided by Lorna and Simon’s wedding and her sister’s insistence that the bridesmaids wear pale blue satin. Pale blue was not Jessie’s colour.
In recent weeks, she’d come to realise how little contact she’d maintained with the crowd from school. A few had married, but not as many as she had expected. Like her, a considerable number had left. They were in London or Sydney or Dubai. Mostly, this separation didn’t bother her. Ger was an exception. Knowing he was back in Clooneven and teaching in St Finian’s, she’d considered calling him but had shied away.
She knew how her Dublin circle would view him. He’d be caricatured as the textbook ‘decent guy from home’: moderately good-looking, a handy footballer, clever but not showily so. The sort of man who drank a half-litre of milk with his dinner, went on stag weekends to Westport and excelled at practical things, like DIY and paying bills. That there was an element of truth to this description didn’t stop it being misleading. He was also one of the shrewdest people she knew.
She’d been queasy about calling because she’d felt too low, her mood not helped by the fact that she’d entered a phase of compulsive comparing. One of the family would make a harmless comment about someone from her year – ‘Did you hear Chloë Downes had twins?’ or ‘I gather Conor Haugh’s after getting a big job in Abu Dhabi’ – and a wave of inadequacy would wash over her. Did she want twins or a big job in Abu Dhabi? No, but at least her contemporaries were out there achieving something.
Her friend Shona claimed that being from a small town was a competitive sport. ‘And you know the thing about sport?’ she’d say. ‘Strong drugs help a lot.’ Behind the flippancy was a hard truth. Small-town judgement tended to be harsh. So, while she wanted to see Ger, she didn’t want it to be right now, like this, when she was flat and depleted. When she was a public failure.
‘Hey, Jessie,’ he said, his voice as laidback as ever. ‘I’d heard you were home. How are you going on?’
‘I’m grand . . . Well, you know.’ There was a world of information in her ‘Well, you know.’
He gave a slight smile. ‘Yeah . . . I was thinking of giving you a shout but . . .’
The past three weeks had taught her to be blunt. ‘If you’re going to give me a hard time, fire ahead. Only the jokes would need to be good because, believe me, I’ve heard them all.’
He held up his hands. ‘No jokes, I promise. Are you back for long?’
That question again. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the boys with the joint sidle away. She wondered if Ger had taught them at school.
‘No, but Mam’s reluctant to let me go back to Dublin. I’d be here for ever if she had her way.’ She quickly realised that her tone was wrong. There was no point in causing unnecessary offence. ‘Not that it’d be the end of the world or anything. I mean—’
‘Relax,’ he said. ‘I know Clooneven’s not for everyone.’
If, in Dublin, Jessie had done little apart from think about her humiliation, in Clooneven, she was trying not to think at all. She was also doing everything possible to avoid her parents’ questions. When asked about her plans, she dodged and deflected until they gave up. The same was true when they asked about Phelim. She couldn’t handle the conversation. Not yet, at any rate.
Her days had taken on a rhythm. She reread old books, helped her mother around the house and listened to a stream of true crime podcasts. When it came to books, she tended to choose either icy American novels with affluent characters who felt guilty all the time or coming-of-age tales where young women with no obvious source of income went to dinner parties and had unsatisfactory sex. Her taste in podcasts was lower grade. She had a particular weakness for serial killers and ‘cheerleader falls on hard times’ stories featuring trailer parks and rampant drug use. She told herself that this was voyeuristic brain rot. But still she listened.
On a couple of occasions, she’d taken care of Lorna’s children. Seven-year-old Ethan and four-year-old Zoë were smart and entertaining, and Jessie looked forward to their teenage rebellions. Already they were wonderfully honest.
Mostly, though, she cycled around the countryside on her old purple bicycle. Clooneven was surrounded by a network of lanes. Few of them led anywhere, and Jessie assumed the houses and farms that had prompted their construction had been abandoned long ago. She thought of them as ghost lanes and doubted they saw much traffic. The late spring was as fine as she could remember, chilly mornings giving way to mild afternoons, the hedgerows brimming with life. She would look at the cloud stamped like tyre tracks across the crisp blue sky or cycle through a tunnel of trees or stop to admire a bank of cowslips and primroses, and for a moment, she’d feel something close to happiness.
She dragged herself back to the present. Ger was still talking.
‘Actually, you were in my thoughts the other day,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
‘I’m teaching sixth class this year, and we’re doing a project on the Famine, so I’ve encouraged them to root out local stories. It makes everything more real. Anyway, one of the first recorded deaths from starvation was around here, and they’d like to find out more.’
‘And that made you think of me?’
Jessie remembered learning about the Famine. She could see the black-and-white illustrations in the school history book: the blight-infested potatoes and emaciated, hollow-eyed children; the workhouses and coffin ships; Robert Peel and Charles Trevelyan. Among the litany of battles lost and punishments endured, it had always stood out.
‘The woman’s address was given as Boherbreen, Clooneven,’ he said.
‘Ah, I get you. That’s Dad’s home patch. Etty lives in Boherbreen.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
The townland of Boherbreen was about three kilometres to the north of Clooneven. Etty was Denis’s eighty-five-year-old mother. Usually, Jessie avoided people who were commonly described as a ‘character’. She considered it a euphemism for ‘pain in the arse’. For her grandmother, she made an exception.
‘What was the woman’s name?’ she said.
‘Johanna Markham, though I’d say our chances of finding out more about her are slim. Keen and all as my investigators are, they’re only twelve. Here,’ he said, taking his phone from the pocket of his jeans and flicking through the images. ‘I have a couple of screenshots. One’s from the book where I first came across a reference to her.’
The book, a history of the Famine, said the death of Mrs Markham, a widow, had been recorded by a local newspaper in the autumn of 1846. A coroner found that she had died from hunger while walking from Clooneven to Kilrush. According to the report, she’d been trying to buy Indian meal for her family, including her daughter, Bridget, and Bridget’s infant girl.
‘God, that’s grim,’ said Jessie, handing back the phone. ‘Poor Johanna. And poor Bridget, not to mention her baby.’
She knew she should offer to put Ger and his class in touch with her grandmother, but the thought of a gang of lively twelve-year-olds filled her with lethargy. Besides, she’d always managed to avoid local-history projects at school and didn’t feel the need to become involved in one now. In her experience, local-history enthusiasts wore brown sweaters and ugly sandals and became unreasonably excited about old stones.
‘So I was wondering,’ said Ger, ‘if Etty might know anything about the history of the area. Any little fact that might help bring the story to life?’
‘We wouldn’t want to be bothering her or anything. Like, the class could write her a letter if needs be.’
Despite her reservations, something about Ger’s face told Jessie that saying no would be a mistake. She’d been relieved to see that, unlike many people, he remained warm towards her. She could do with an ally. She also knew that staying completely detached from life in Clooneven wasn’t a good idea. It only gave further ammunition to the gossips.
‘You know Etty’s spent her whole life on those few acres?’ she said. ‘She grew up on the next farm, and she first met my granddad when she was four or five.’
‘You definitely didn’t get the wanderlust from her, so.’
Jessie smiled. ‘Why don’t I mention the project to her, in case there’s something she can tell you?’
‘That’d be fantastic,’ said Ger. ‘The class are very keen, and they’d be thrilled to discover a bit more. They’re a great bunch.’
‘Okay, then. I have your number, and I can message you if Etty has anything to say. Speaking of which . . .’ She pulled her buzzing phone from her jacket pocket. ‘Bear with me a sec.’
The call was from Lorna. Jessie allowed it to go to voicemail. She noticed that she’d missed four calls: one from her mother and three from her sister. There was also a message: A man called Dan O’Doherty is looking for you. He said you’ll know who he is and why he wants to talk to you. He was VERY angry. What’s going on?
For a few seconds, she was quiet. Apart from one knee, which gave a sudden wobble, her entire body stiffened.
‘Sorry,’ she said eventually. ‘That was a message from Lorna. She’s a terrible woman. Honestly, I can’t get a minute’s peace. Anyway . . .’
Ger dipped his head, as if dealing with a troubled child. ‘Is something wrong?’ he asked.
Once again, Jessie should have been prepared. She should have known that Dan would find her. What she was going to do now, she wasn’t sure. She could try lying to Lorna and her parents, but there was a danger that she would need their help.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said to Ger. ‘Like I say, Lorna’s a demon for getting worked up about nothing.’ She slipped her phone back into her pocket.
‘If you’re certain . . .’
‘I am,’ she said, doing her best to sound calm. ‘And I promise that if Etty knows anything about Johanna and Bridget, or anyone belonging to them, I’ll get in touch.’