Nothing much had changed on the farm. In fact, Sean thought, it was rather like journeying back in Doctor Who’s Tardis. His father was dead and buried. A brain tumour had reduced a man built like an ox with the most robust of constitutions, to dust. Emmet, the second son, the favoured one, the child who fit snugly into the rural scene, had assumed the mantle of authority as his birthright. And to fortify his position he had taken himself a wife, Grania Quinn. She was the fourth daughter of good solid stock. Her jaw line was well defined. Her eyebrows were raven black and bold. And she had a light furring of hair across her upper lip that looked like a moustache in the midday sun. Her wide hips had effortlessly delivered him two strapping sons, Colum and Hugh, proving the merit of his choice. His mother still presided over the kitchen, only now they had a stove, electricity, an inside privy, and running water, hot and cold.
Emmet had greeted his sudden arrival with deep-rooted suspicion, which even the bottle of Jameson’s Whiskey had done little to assuage. He still feared being usurped by his older brother, his eyes contracting to pencil-thin lines, his lips pulling like a drawstring purse when he saw him toiling up the lane. Inwardly Sean crowed at his wariness. But as his fatigued eyes took in the slopes of tussocky pasture, the cows ambling aimlessly about beset with flies, he admitted to himself the full extent of his loathing for this mean, grudging soil. Emmet could have it and welcome. He had never wanted it, not any part of it; not his mother sucked of all goodness until her weathered skin was wrinkled like a prune’s and her hands were rubbed raw; not his father who had lumbered about, arrogant in his ruthless, unyielding assertion of right and wrong, dealing out his farmyard justice with a peeled birch cane; not his brother who smugly attended church with his family every Sunday morning, and who masturbated away the afternoons in the outside toilet, poring over pictures of naked women he had found under the leaves of an unlit bonfire on the Boyles’ neighbouring farm.
Sean had talked up his London success over a supper of stew and potatoes, his fast-growing retail business, his beautiful wife, Catherine, his model baby daughter, Bria, while Emmet’s brood goggled at him curiously, and Emmet’s wife busied herself cruising the table, topping up her family’s fast-emptying bowls. The spoons had scraped the china like chalk squeaking discord on a blackboard. His nephews’ Adam’s apples had yo-yoed madly in their feeding frenzy. And his mother, an animal’s unquestioning tolerance in her empty eyes, had chewed and chewed with her bad teeth on a chunk of bread soaked in milk. Every so often she had eyed this man who had grown in her womb, as if he had fallen from Mars. Emmet, at the head of the table, had sipped his whiskey sourly from a greasy tumbler, spooned his food unthinkingly into his mouth, and glowered at his older brother at the opposite end of the table with close-set eyes. If he had been a cat his tail would have been twitching, and a low premonitory growl would have emanated through the nicotine-stained enamel of his overbite.
They’d made up a bed for Sean on the settee in the small room off the kitchen, the one that his mother optimistically liked to call the parlour. The family was settled at the other end of the house, beyond the right-angle in the tail of the single-storey building. Sean sat and waited. He listened as the distant sounds of the house quietened, a door closing, something grating, his brother’s gruff bark, and then there were only the creaks of the ancient farm’s bones, the dyspeptic gurgles of pipes and the sonorous tick of the mantel clock. At just gone midnight the nocturnal cradle song stole into the comparative hush, the breeze hefting the window experimentally, the hoot of an owl, the click of claws behind the wainscot, the plaintive lowing of a cow, and yes, he could just detect it, the a cappella chorus floating to him on the unfurling spinnakers of river mist.
He had brought the book and he fingered it now in the squint of lamplight. The grey cover was worn and tattered, and the pages had grown flimsy as tissue paper with constant handling. He leafed through it, pausing at the diagrams, those fantastical diagrams that had fired his young mind. He sniffed in the frowsty odour, more welcome to him than the bouquet of a fine wine. Who would have thought the absurd little man in the old-fashioned pantaloon bathing trunks, and the hat that looked like a pilot’s helmet, would have taken him step by step to heaven? With infinite patience he had taught him how he might seduce an Eve who was the nonpareil of womanly perfection. Again he heard her call to her lover. In answer he took up the book, pushed the packet of prescription sleeping pills, Mogadon, twenty in all, to the bottom of his trouser pocket, slipped the bottle of Armagnac under his arm and set off.
As he started down the hill, he felt a charge of adrenalin course round his body at the prospect of the reunion. All these years, he had not forgotten and neither had she. He recalled the welts on his bare buttocks, his thighs, his back, how they stung after his father’s savage beatings. He halted for a moment, wincing as he recollected the exquisite pain. For days it had been as if his skin was covered in a swarm of wasps, biting him over and over. It had bled, to begin with a weak, watery sort of blood mixed with pus, that gradually thickened to a deep crimson goo. Then this too had hardened, and small scabs had formed that had caught on the fabric of his clothes, occasionally being knocked off with friction and weeping anew. And afterwards the itching as the healing commenced. Somehow all of it was connected with her. The humiliation of having to strip before this red-faced Da, the man who had set himself up to be Sean’s judge and jury. And the submission, bearing the torture without crying out, humbled by the feelings of self-purification that had invested him later.
It was a cool, damp night, the haze of mizzle moonlit, so that it seemed he was walking through a fairy landscape draped with lengths of spangled organza. Over his head was a pauper’s night sky, with here and there cloud rags worried by eddies of wind. The moon was as yellow as the thick cream which rose like a sun in the still-warm milk pails of his boyhood. The sight of it re covered the smells of the milking shed for him; the immaculate astringency of the sluggishly breaking day; the sweetness of the straw crunch interspersed with the ripe steam of the beasts’ breaths; the splat of dung that exuded the comfortable waft of the earth’s entrails; the taste of his own inhalations, still vinegary with the stagnancy of sleep; the ‘siss, siss’ of the bluish-white line of milk darting into the snowy broth; and the invasive chill that made him lean in closer to the heat of the coarsely haired flank, while the dumb creature patiently tolerated his fumbling, stiff fingers pulling on her udder.
But now as he reaches his mistress his face is saturated, the burn of his eyes delivered into a healing witch-hazel bath. Oh no, he does not imagine the leap of her as he tumbles out from the now heavier curtain of drizzle. He sags on the small apron of beach in his jeans and soggy fisherman’s sweater, in his socks and his shoes, feeling overdressed in her presence, wondering if she can really recognize him after so much of her has flowed on past to the sea.
‘I didn’t bring my bike,’ he mutters bashfully, as if to prod her memory. Mist vapours cling to her black surface, like a slinky diaphanous evening gown, affording slashed glimpses of her sable flesh. His heart is so full that there is no room for words. But the most incredible thing about her is that it doesn’t matter, that she reads his deepest thoughts as though they are her own. He treads down to where she varnishes the shingle and the pebbles, flirting with the wet tickle of her. And he sits, clumsily, falling on his bottom at the last, jarring his coccyx painfully on the unyielding jags of the stones. His shoes are dipping in her and she is seeping, soothing as balm, into his nylon socks, tempting him. He leans forwards, and without unlacing them shoehorns them off, hurling them as far out as he can, hearing, gratified, her splashes of reception. She toys with one of them for a second, makes a raft of it and gives it safe passage, before wrecking it with a sudden surge and greedy suck.
He uncorks the brandy, holds the bottle to his lips and drinks a long draught, so that it barely touches his mouth, so that it is a moment before he experiences the resurgent slam of it, jabbing hotly into the soft membrane of his throat. Then he sets the bottle down among the grit, silt and stones. Next he rummages in his pocket, produces the envelope and carefully prises it open. He jiggles the white tablets out into the tremulous palm of his hand, drops his head and licks them off it, four, two, one, three, and again until they are all gone. As he chews his mother looms out of the mist. She is masticating her softened white bread like one of their cows chewing cud, mindlessly. She swallows, her toothless mouth yawning wide, and fat white maggots of script wiggle out of the cracked corners.
‘Wicked . . . unnatural boy . . . naked . . . no shame . . . as God was his witness . . . diving off the rocks . . . the Shannon . . . an evil spirit in him . . . the Father says it’s Satan’s doing . . . whip the sin from him . . . cavorting with the devil in the river . . . a water demon.’
When his taste buds start humming with the bitterness, and the impulse to spew up all the wretchedness threatens to overwhelm him, he reaches fast for the bottle. He gulps and his throat, anaesthetized to the scorch, feels nothing but a woolly abrasion. He gives it a shake. Over half gone. He places it carefully back down, pulls off his wet socks and climbs to his feet. He undresses, his baggy, soggy cable-knit first, making a shorn sheep of him, then his granddad T-shirt. While the drizzle smacks the crucifix set of his shoulders and runs in little rivulets down his belly, he wrestles with his belt buckle. He blinks back raindrops or they might be tears, and contemplates all the buckles he has ever sold in the market, visualizes a mountain of them glittering in the sun like a pile of factory waste. The belt comes apart as if by its own volition, and he unzips his flies. His jeans fall in elaborate circus flounces around his bare feet. He wears no pants and once he has stepped out of them, more tricky to accomplish than he has envisaged, he is naked and has nowhere to hide. The crab pinch of the riverside stones is at him then, but they seem to be hurting some other man on some other shore. He is . . . what? He breathes . . . he breathes . . . he breathes the way the cows breathe in the milking shed in the early morning greyness, with will and effort, a wilful, effortful soughing.
He will dance for her, dance for her in the rain. He has the spider bite in his blood and he will dance the venom out of his heart, dance the tarantella. And so he begins, slowly, slowly, step and step and twist and fall, and lift his arms and arch his back, and roll his head, and clap and whirl and duck and spin. Bend like a blade of grass torn from its roots by the keen trawl of the north wind. Faster and faster he goes, immune to the daggers that pierce the soles of his feet. He is like Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid, only a merman, treading on the points of nails or sharp knives, but like her he bears the agony willingly for his lady. He kneels down and begs her forgiveness for leaving, for his failed dreams, for Catherine who lay like an iron clod under him, for Bria who he loves dearly but not enough, for letting the hounds and horses run away with him, for chancing his luck with a mad blue buck who has trodden him down to the muck of his being.
‘For all this and more, Shannon forgive me.’ His confession, heavy with tears, falls and trickles between the stones, then subsides into the silt of her.
He staggers up, stoops for his bottle, drains the last drop and sends it spinning through the night to plant the crystal seed of itself in her belly. It is his harbinger, going before its master to bring her news of his coming. Again he offers her the gyre of his body, spinning arms outspread, the way he did as a boy. When at last he pauses, breathless and giddy, he is showered clean so that he is ready for her.
‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.’ He hesitates, in that instant knowing he is unworthy, raising his heavy head in the certain knowledge of her rejection. But when, black arms braceleted with bangles of moonshine, she beckons, her desire, he understands with a start, is as great as his. And as he wades into her icy embrace, collapsing into the polish of her mystery, she slides in eager response over him. He can wait no more. She senses it and opens her currents to him. He plunges then, plunges into her and she cushions his fall in the finest watered silk.
In her perfection is his absolution. He is as fine now as the virgin boy who came to her in his innocence. He has let life inveigle him away from her. He deserted his only true love, his Shannon. But now he will make amends for his betrayal, he vows, as he swims into her depths. He will give himself wholly to her, forsaking all others, forevermore. She succours him and then bids him lay his weary head on her dusky bosom. ‘I am so tired, so very tired.’ She knows his thoughts and lisps back to him in the parlance of the river.
‘Lie with me, Sean. Give your will over to the flow of me. And let me take you with me to my mother, the sea. For there a bed has been made ready.’