Alison pulled on a fresh pair of jeans and a pale green T-shirt. People always told her green was her colour – brought out her eyes or some such nonsense, she scoffed, pushing her toes into her ancient flip-flops. In the bathroom she scrubbed and moisturised her face, smiled when she caught herself humming as she fixed her hair into a loose loop at the base of her neck. She hesitated a moment before spraying a tiny burst of perfume on her neck and wrists – no harm in taking a little pride in yourself, she instructed silently, pushing William’s approving gaze out of her mind. Eugene’s article tucked into her leather bag, she smiled into the hall mirror before hurrying out the door.
‘I’ll park down by the quay, that’s fairly central to everything.’ And it’s got the cheapest hourly rate, Alison added silently. ‘Anywhere in particular you want to go?’
‘I’d love a prowl around in the Book Centre,’ William answered over his shoulder, keeping an eye out for a vacant space.
‘Coffee?’ Alison suggested as they entered the bookshop.
‘Yes, thanks. Black, no sugar. I’ll be with you in a tick.’ William moved to the ‘Health and Psychology’ section, while Alison chose a table in the small coffee bar, sunken a few steps below the shelved areas. She placed their order and took out Eugene’s article to give it a quick, final scan.
‘This is for you.’ Sitting down opposite, William pushed a slim Gary Larson volume across the table towards her.
‘How did you know I liked him?’ The surprised smile lit and lifted her whole face, just as William had always supposed it might.
‘An inspired guess, check out page seventy-nine.’
Alison flicked to the nominated page and threw back her head in a throaty laugh. The man at the next table cast a disapproving glance over his glasses. She cupped her hand over her mouth, her eyes wet with mirth. She flicked to a random page, passed the book back across the table. William’s raucous laughter was infectious. The man with the glasses shook out his paper and turned his back slightly. Eyes widened, William drew a finger across his upper lip, his nod directed towards Alison’s mouth. Licking the cappuccino froth from her top lip, Alison felt something fall from her shoulders, felt a light-heartedness, a freedom rise like a forgotten tide inside her.
Weakened with wet-faced laughter, they left the bookshop and ambled companionably down Michael Street, stopping here and there to listen to the buskers, sample some treats from the stall holders at the French Market. Later, sipping coffee at a street-side table they wild guessed at the outrageous items the shoppers might have in their bags, diagnosed the varied causes of the hurried, anxious looks on their faces.
Eugene Dalton’s jaw dropped when he saw a radiant Alison arrive with the article. Early. It almost hit the brown carpet of his outdated office when he took in the unlikely companion waiting for her outside the door – and the way she smiled into the older man’s face.
‘Let me treat you to dinner.’ William’s hip was feeling the strain of the day’s walking. ‘Anywhere you’d recommend?’
‘It’s ages since I’ve eaten out in town. An Beal Bocht, that used to be one of my favourites. Let’s go there. It’s just down here, under the arch,’ she added, aware of William’s limp and the tiredness in his face.
‘Lead the way.’
They headed down the narrow cobbled street, passed under the archway and into the dimly lit restaurant.
‘Table for two, please,’ Alison smiled to the young waiter. ‘By the window, if possible.’
‘This way, please.’
The formal black trousers and crisp white shirt looked completely out of place on his young, snake-thin body. His skin was the colour of honey, his long black hair tied in a sleek pony tail. A foreigner, Alison guessed, so young and so far away from home. Like Hannah. A tiny blade of loneliness nicked her chest as she followed the waiter to the window alcove.
‘Perfect,’ William grinned.
‘I’ll leave you to choose.’ Handing them their menus, the waiter lit the soft red candle in the centre of the table before disappearing behind the bar.
‘I haven’t been here in – it must be five years!’ Alison looked around her as she spoke. ‘And the place hasn’t changed one bit,’ she smiled. The wooden floors, old and worn, were patterned by cigarette burns from the pre-smoking-ban era. Old oil lamps, jugs and earthenware hot water jars jostled for space on the picture high shelves along each wall. The intimate, confessional-like booths whispered decades of secrets and sharing, the half-light through the narrow, sharp-peaked windows soothing the bleached table wood.
‘It’s beautiful,’ William replied. ‘So peaceful. There’s a gothic, almost a spiritual feel about it.’
Alison smiled inside. He could feel it too.
‘I’m starving.’ She opened her menu.
‘And what does the lady recommend?’
They debated the menu, the aroma from the kitchen urging them on.
‘Wine?’ William asked, as the waiter took their order.
‘I’m driving,’ Alison sighed. ‘But maybe one glass? Red, please.’
‘A bottle of your house red, then.’
‘I’m exhausted.’ Alison sat back in her seat.
‘I’ve really enjoyed today. Your company’s a tonic.’
‘You weren’t thinking that last Saturday night.’ She bent her head slightly, her cheeks colouring.
‘We all have our bad days. And nights,’ he reassured. ‘That’s what makes us human.’
Lifting her head, she folded her arms, looked around her again. ‘Me and Sean used to come here a lot when we were first married.’
‘You married young?’ William sat forward, tasted the wine and nodded his approval to the waiter before resting his elbows on the table, his arms folded before him.
‘I was almost eighteen when Mum died. I’d just started college.’
‘What did you study?’
‘English literature, I was going to be a famous journalist.’ Her smile held a hint of regret.
‘And what happened?’
‘When Mum died, a lot of my ambition died with her. And a lot of other stuff too. It was the death of our family in a way.’ She bowed her head, traced her forehead with her middle finger, then, looking up, met his eyes. ‘Claire, my sister – the one in London – she couldn’t handle it. I suppose she felt that when all her love, all her efforts at keeping Mum alive failed, then she had somehow failed too. She blamed herself in some bizarre way. God, was she angry. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone quite so angry. So hurt. It was as if she felt betrayed by everything she believed in. She threw herself into wild parties, drink, sex, anything that helped her forget.’ She stared into her glass for a moment before lifting it to her lips.
‘And your dad, was he still alive?’ William prompted.
‘Dad was still with us – in a way. He accepted it really well. Quietly. I suppose he had gotten used to the idea long before Mum died. He hadn’t fooled himself like we had. Then he got so caught up in Claire’s problems. I suppose it gave him a focus,’ she shrugged.
‘And where did that leave you?’
‘Alone, and I suppose kind of unmoored in a way. I couldn’t do the student thing any more. The lectures that I’d devoured before just floated over my head. I began to spend more and more time down here with Sean. Before eighteen months were out, I’d packed in college and moved down for good.’
The food arrived and Alison seemed glad of the distraction. ‘Looks delicious,’ she commented and, as if by some wordless agreement, they left the conversation and concentrated on their food, their silence punctuated by small talk and laughter.
* * *
Sean must have been almost seventeen, Maryanne supposed, by the time the darkness had come to inhabit his whole face. Right from his early teens she had watched it establishing itself, almost imperceptibly at first, in the tightening line of his mouth and then gradually, year by year, inching its way forward, upwards, until it simmered in his eyes like a threatening storm, the weight of that darkness causing him always, in those years, to hold his head at a downward tilt.
That consuming desire to please his father long folded and stored away, at six foot two Sean now stood head and shoulders above his childhood idol. Tides were turning. Maryanne could almost hear again that brittle cautiousness that had crept into Frank’s words, could see him again now, standing half stooped on the back of the lorry, stacking the lobster pots that Sean hauled up to him with a strength and vigour that could only ever be a memory now for Frank.
How vividly she could picture Sean’s hands. Their solid span, the dip between thumb and index finger scarred and cracked and hardened by years of salt water and heavy, wet rope; the roughened, reddened knuckles; the deep gouge in the pad of his left index finger where a hook had once embedded itself – those same strong hands that could still rest on Maryanne’s shoulders with the gentleness of an angel’s wings.
It hadn’t frightened her, Sean’s darkness. What it had done – and she realised this one evening as she looked away from Frank, sitting by the fire, holding the wrist of his right hand in a vice grip in an effort to stem its tremor – what it had done was to somehow transfer itself into the small corner of her heart that still had room for Frank and to cut the light there, turning that space into something resembling one of those old travelling trunks she remembered from childhood: battered, locked, forgotten.
* * *
‘Did you marry straight away after moving?’ They had almost finished their meal and William was anxious to steer the conversation back to Alison and her bond with Carniskey.
‘Oh no, I lived here in town for a couple of years. Worked in the college, on their magazine. They were good years,’ she smiled. ‘We married just after my twenty-first birthday – and yes, Hannah was already on the way.’ She beckoned the waiter. ‘D’you fancy a coffee?’
‘No. I’ll stick with this. The advantage of having a reliable chauffer.’ William grinned, refilling his wine glass.
‘I moved to Carniskey then.’ Alison rested back in her seat. ‘We bought that little fisherman’s cottage I’m living in now. It was late spring and so beautiful. The whitethorn and the gorse and the sea pinks put on their finest colours to welcome me.’ The memory glowed on her face. ‘Sean was like the king of the place, with the long season stretched out before him. His mood, every move he made mimicked the awakening, the hope all around him. It was all I could have wished for.’ She inched her head forward. ‘Just about the same time that you arrived this year, actually. Did you feel it? The celebration, that sense of hope?’
‘That was what made me decide to stop off here,’ William nodded, smiling. ‘Just like you’ve described. Like it’s calling you to join it. Like you’re being drawn here, have a part to play in it all.’
‘What do you think your part is?’ Alison sat forward, excited to find someone who voiced what she so often felt – a sense of something bigger at play, something beyond us, moving us.
‘I don’t know yet. And I don’t question it. I’ve learned just to go along with it. To follow my instincts. Everything reveals itself in time.’
‘Is that why you move about so much?’
‘Partly. And partly because I don’t want to attach myself to any place, to any person in particular.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because there is nothing permanent in this life.’ Elbows on the table, he joined his hands, prayer-like, his fingertips touching his lips. ‘Nothing we can hold on to or take with us. Everything is constantly moving, that same cycle of birth and death moving through every life, every relationship, everything.’ He paused, his eyes holding hers. ‘Nothing is ours to keep. Or to own. And I suppose I’ve learned that through the heartache of attaching myself too much, centring my life on someone. Then they’re gone. Heartbreak is a cruel but thorough teacher. It’s taught me just to live each day. No expectations, no regrets. Just each moment.’ He smiled at Alison, at the frown of concentration rippling her brow.
‘But is that not very lonely?’
‘I spend most of my days alone. But no, I can’t say I’m lonely. And look at the company I have this evening,’ he joked, in an effort to move the conversation away from himself, back to her. ‘So, did you keep your job at the college after you married?’
‘I quit shortly after. Sean was my whole world then. Sean and Carniskey. And anyway, Hannah was on the way.’ That smile again, lifting her whole face. ‘We were so excited that autumn, preparing for her.’ And then just as quickly that familiar shadow, beginning in her eyes, stealing her light. ‘I think that was what kept Sean going. Kept him up.’
‘Up?’ William raised his brows.
‘Yeah, or maybe because of my own preoccupation with Hannah’s arrival I didn’t really notice any change in him that winter. But the following one . . . ’ She fell silent for a moment, busied herself sugaring her coffee. ‘You could read him, you know.’ She stirred the coffee slowly, thoughtfully. ‘Sean. Read him by the sky. By the colours and height of the sea, the length of the day . . . ’
‘His mood?’ William prompted.
‘Even more than that. His whole being. On the days that the sun shone it was like it shone through him. From him. A calm and open sea and Sean would be up before the birds, moving through the house like a life force.’ Her smile was wistful now, her gaze somewhere far away. ‘October always heralded the changes.’ Her eyes returned to William. ‘The gradual withdrawal. The long solitary walks on the cliff tops. Hours in the shed, mending nets, making pots. Sullen and sulking like a teenager rejected by his first love.’ She looked down, folded and unfolded the paper napkin in her lap. ‘As the weeks and months went on he’d retreat further and further from myself and Hannah, stalking from the room every time she’d cry or look for his attention. Usually before Christmas the long silence would have descended and would last till his lover accepted him back.’
‘His lover?’
‘That’s how it felt. He couldn’t go out on the sea and he tortured himself watching it. Watching her. Every day either out on the cliffs or along the road between home and Tra na Baid. Driving slowly, stopping, watching, yearning. Then home to us like a dead man – no talk, no emotion. Complete shutdown.’
‘How did you cope?’ William hadn’t been prepared for her honesty and openness.
‘It’s amazing what you learn to live with,’ she half-smiled. ‘What you get used to. I learned to live around it. Around him. I had Hannah and my writing. I threw myself into them and waited out my time for spring.’ She sighed, her thoughts and her eyes straying away again. William didn’t speak, waited for her to return to him.
‘In a lot of ways it was like being back in the days when we’d first met and I’d return to Dublin at the end of the holidays. The heartache and the longing every year. The promise of the following summer. It was as if those teenage years had been a preparation, you know, for what lay ahead?’ William nodded his understanding.
‘But nothing could have prepared me to lie beside someone at night, sit down to meals with them, loving them, wanting them, seeing them, but they’re not there.’ Aware of the new, sharper edge that had entered her voice Alison paused and, biting down on her lip, glanced out into the half-light under the archway where a gentle rain polished the patterned stones.
‘Did you talk to him about it?’
She looked again towards William and it was as if the same soft rain had brushed her eyes. ‘It didn’t matter what I said or thought. It was like he was in his world and there was no place there for me. I made the mistake one day of suggesting I go back to work. Things were tight, you know, no money coming in. He spoke then, all right. Ranted and roared about how no one would question his providing and caring for his family. Hannah must have been eight, maybe nine at the time. I remember her crying, running from the room . . . ’
‘Did he hurt you?’ William’s voice was soft, echoing her pain.
‘No, no, never. Not in any physical way. And that outburst was an isolated one. It was the silence that hurt most, the withholding of all communication, all emotion. That hurts in a far deeper way, I think. It was like he was punishing me for the way he felt the sea was punishing him.’
‘And you stayed? Didn’t you talk to anyone?’
‘What was the point? To the outside world, Sean was his usual self. If somebody called to the house, he’d chat away as normal. Then, as soon as they left, he’d clamp up again. The same in the pub – he’d go quite often, stay late. It was as if he was blaming me, me and Hannah, at least that’s what it felt like. And I suppose I just got used to it over the years.’ Her sigh was heavy. ‘Reasoned that it was a kind of depression, that he had no control over it. That you only hurt those you love, all that kind of stuff. That was my way of making sense of it. And I just lived and hoped for an early and long season when I knew I’d have him back.’ Her right hand had found its way to her wedding ring, twisting it round and round in circles towards her heart. It was a habit she had developed in the early days after Sean was lost, touching it every time she thought of him, spoke of him. It was a habit that had angered her lately and it angered her even more now when she saw William watching her.
‘I know what you’re thinking.’ She folded her arms across her chest, challenge lighting her eyes. ‘You think I was stupid, don’t you, that I was weak?’
‘Alison, I wouldn’t for a second—’ He sat forward, eyes wide, meeting hers.
‘Why wouldn’t you? You didn’t know him. You could never understand the— ’
‘I understand how much you loved him.’
‘And he loved me.’ Her words weighed with something much deeper than sadness, she turned her head slowly towards the window. ‘Loved me with a fierceness I know I’ll never find again.’
William sat back in his seat, fingered the stem of his glass. He knew that fierceness that she talked about, knew the gaping, unfillable emptiness of its loss. ‘And he’s gone three years now?’ His voice, gentle, inviting her back to him.
‘Missing three years since October.’ Her hand twisting the wedding ring again as she turned to meet his eyes. ‘His body has never been recovered. And it’s like a continuation of the same theme,’ she sighed, sitting forward as she rubbed the tips of her fingers along the arch of her brows, then rested her chin in her hands. ‘He’s gone but he’s not gone. Just like he was with me but he wasn’t with me. And it just wears me down. Sometimes I feel like I never had him, like I’d always lost him. Yet somehow he’s still there. Oh, I’m making a complete mess of this – it’s hard to explain, sorry, I’ve gone on too long I’m . . . ’
‘No, you haven’t.’ William touched a hand to hers. ‘I feel privileged that you could share your thoughts with me. It takes a lot of courage.’
‘That’s something I certainly haven’t got.’ She drew her hand away. ‘Just look at me, for heaven’s sake! If I had courage I would have left Carniskey long ago. Got out and got on with making a life for myself and Hannah. But I can’t. I’m stuck. I’ve stuck myself to it. And for what? I can’t even tell myself never mind trying to explain . . . ’ Her eyes burned with frustration. ‘And I can see what it’s doing to me. I know people are right when they say I’m half mad, but I feel powerless to change and . . . and look at you sitting there! I haven’t the first clue who you are or why I’m telling you all this.’ Slow tears fell, almost timidly, from her eyes. She scrunched the napkin tight in her fist. ‘I’m going to the Ladies.’
William sat back, stared at the slow trickle of rain down the windowpane, the street light tracing its meander with a soft orange glow. He smiled at the beauty of tears, their liberation, their healing. He had never seen Helene cry. But he had seen the dark depths of her tears, dammed behind her eyes. Maybe, if he had understood pain then, he could have helped her release them. Maybe if he hadn’t been so selfish, so wrapped up in his own smug ambition . . .
‘Can I get you anything else, sir?’ The waiter’s voice was soft, as if acknowledging the sacred space surrounding the small window table.
‘No, thanks, just the bill.’ William looked into the young man’s eyes and for one brief second wished he was there again. There at that wonderful launch into life where anything, everything was possible, the whole world and all its adventures out there for the taking. A small fist of fear tightened around his heart at the thought of the little time left to him, the uncertainty, the unknown that followed. He was relieved to see Alison return to the table.
‘Time to head on?’ She gathered up her bag and jacket. ‘I hope I haven’t bored you.’ The lightness of her tone failed to mask the sadness in her wearied face.
‘I’ve enjoyed every moment.’
They left the city behind and followed the dark, winding road to Carniskey. ‘That was one thing that took me a while to get used to,’ Alison remarked, ‘when I moved out here first. The darkness. That absolute blackness at night. In Dublin we had a street light outside our bedroom window. Same when I lived in town. That pitch black at night was quite a shock, but I soon grew to love it. Isn’t there something about the dark that allows you to be yourself?’
‘I think it encourages the parts of us that are too timid for daylight.’
‘And it heightens the senses,’ Alison jumped in, enthused. ‘You know, like when you try to find your way in the dark, you’re much more aware of sounds and smells, the presence of objects – even the energy around them.’
‘Maybe it’s more our natural state,’ William offered. ‘I mean, when you think of our nine months in the darkness of the womb. And who knows, maybe we came from darkness before that. Maybe all this electricity and neon we’ve invented is killing off parts of our soul.’
* * *
‘Yes!’ Rob spun on his heel and punched the air. He flopped down on the couch, swung his feet up on the cushions and laying his head on the arm rest, closed his eyes. Thank God she had said yes because at this stage the girl had just about exhausted him.
He had never imagined that winning a woman could be such hard work – especially a woman who had already declared her love for you. They were a strange species, women, and none stranger and harder to crack – he was willing to bet – than the one he had chosen.
And that wasn’t the only thing he had learned about women. That line you often heard about them thinking they had a monopoly on feelings, well it was actually true. All this talk on the phone about how hurt her feelings were, how confused she felt. Almost four weeks now since she had given him the door – well, she had really, given that she had left him with no choice but to walk out – and not a word about how he might have felt. Did she think he was made of wood? Didn’t the flowers and the calls and the texts and those big balloons he’d had delivered to her work tell her anything?
She had literally laughed out loud when she had admitted that yes, she had seen him that evening in the frozen food aisle at Whites. ‘Lurking,’ she called it, before laughing and likening him to a stalker. He could have taken offence, claimed his ‘feelings were hurt’. But oh, he knew better. Practically a whole month now he had waited to hear that laugh, the full, deep uncensored thrill of it. He knew as soon as it reached his ear that she was melting and that a yes would surely follow. What did his pride matter when risked with losing that?
He stretched to his full length, luxuriating in his plans. Saturday night – all going well – would lay the foundations and within two weeks, he reckoned, he’d have the whole thing cemented. He smiled to himself. Rob, the humble construction worker, building a whole new world!
* * *
Alison snuggled down under the bedclothes, pulled the pillows beneath her shoulders and relived the day in her head: the morning on the beach, the book shop, wandering around town, the meal and the chat, the laughter on the way home. She sighed, her whole body seeming to join in her smile. Something inside her felt different, like a stone had been lifted, shifted somehow, and the light was finally getting in. She didn’t allow herself one moment’s guilt about missing today’s visit to Maryanne or Hannah’s telephone call. This had been the first day in an age that she had taken completely for herself and she reckoned she well deserved it. Maryanne wouldn’t miss her for the one day and Hannah was barely fitting in her five-minute calls as it was. Anyway, she reasoned, she’d be better for both of them if she learned to take some time for herself.
She liked William. Loved his sense of fun – it had been so long since she’d laughed like that. At nothing. At stupid, childish things. And the way she could talk to him. About things she had never dared voice before. Things that she’d hardly admitted to herself, let alone spoken out loud. But something about him drew her out, encouraged her, made her trust him completely. There was a gentleness in him, a genuine acceptance, something in his eyes, in his whole face that let you know he already understood what you were struggling to get across. He could make a really good friend. There was something totally safe about him. He won’t be around much longer, a niggling voice in her head pushed to the front to be heard. He’ll be leaving as well. She switched the voice off with the light, turned on her side and, smiling, closed her eyes, allowing the day to replay behind them.
* * *
William sat on the edge of the cliff at Tra na Leon. He closed his eyes to block out the light of the stars. Darkness. Darkness and silence and emptiness surrounded him. He could hear his heart beat. Feel the warmth of his exhaled breath on his upper lip. The sound of the waves embracing the rocks below rushed to meet him, the giggle of the shingle as it danced with the tide.
And he could feel it again. That cold metallic hand squeezing his heart, making it shrink and pound harder, like a tiny creature, cornered. He sat with it and listened.
When his cancer had first been diagnosed six years earlier, William’s doctor hadn’t held out much hope. But the brain tumour had been removed and the chemotherapy and radiation had eradicated the invader from his body. He shivered now, remembering that time. The fear, the anger, the denial. And above all the unbearable loneliness. He had brushed death’s cheek in the quiet of that sterile ward, had watched it lead Joe, a frightened thirty-three year old, slowly, bed by bed, down the ward, and then across the corridor to the single room, death’s waiting room, and finally away to its own world. William had waited, resigned, ready to follow, ever watchful, even in sleep. But death chose to pass his bed and William had walked from the hospital. Walked into a world that he had never really been aware of before. His intimacy with death had opened his eyes and his heart and his mind to a life he had so long endured but had not lived. He walked back into that world as if he was entering it for the first time. Death had stripped him of all but his name. Layer by layer, it had peeled away who or what he was, or thought he had been. It had shown him how what little control he imagined he possessed could so easily be thieved – from his mind, his feelings, everything, right down to his bowels. Dignity, pride, independence, talent – all that he had for so long defined as self, stripped like garments, one by one, to reveal a naked, frightened child. And he looked at the world again from that child’s place: enthusiastic, liberated, open. He knew at that moment, when he turned at the door and took one last look down the hushed ward, that he would never again take one single day for granted. And he would never again fear death.
When the cancer returned before Christmas, this time positioning itself under the brain from where it could not be lifted, William had not panicked. Like an army invading and claiming new territory, it had travelled to his hip by February. William did not fight back. Any attempt at surgery, Fogarty advised, carried almost certain loss of motor and nervous function. Loss of mobility, loss of speech. William had decided to go with loss of life in its entirety. He was aware that radical drug treatment would prolong the time left to him. But he had been there before. Had endured their harrowing effects. No, not this time. This time death would take him. And he would go sooner in relative health, rather than later, ravaged by the battle the drugs would fight, and eventually lose.
This evening in the restaurant was the first time he had felt that pinch of fear, felt that pull towards life, and he couldn’t understand what had prompted it. Was it that it was getting closer now? Was it the raw life in Alison’s throaty laugh? Or was it the huge sense of birth and reawakening, the almost magic of this place? It seemed such a contradiction to die at this time of year. He sat on, eyes closed in the darkness, till all the voices stilled in his head and peace returned with the dawn.