The Home Scar, page 1
About the Author
The Home Scar is Kathleen MacMahon’s fourth novel. Her previous novel, Nothing But Blue Sky, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2021. She is a former radio and television journalist with Ireland’s national broadcaster RTÉ and lives in her native Dublin with her family.
Kathleen MacMahon
* * *
THE HOME SCAR
Contents
PART ONE Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
PART TWO Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Acknowledgements
For Kevin and Meg
The storm came in late summer. It swept in off the Atlantic, bringing high seas and gale force winds that battered the whole of the west coast. It was severe enough to earn itself a name, a red warning, a lead slot on the news. People were told to stay away from the sea, but even so some ventured out to observe the spectacle. There were surfers seen riding the waves in Sligo, the occasional swimmer at Salthill. They were endangering the lives of others as well as their own, according to the spokesperson for Water Safety Ireland who went on the radio to warn of the risks. As it happened, there was nobody drowned, leading some to say the dangers had been exaggerated. The storm had not been so dramatic after all. Bearing in mind what was happening in the rest of the world, it seemed blessedly tame.
The TV was at that time broadcasting pictures on a nightly basis of forest fires in Catalonia. Vast tracts of the Amazon were in flames, while in Mexico there were reports of snow. A hellish heatwave raged across Europe, with record-breaking temperatures in France, Germany and Poland. City dwellers took to the fountains to cool down. Ice pops were handed out to the zoo animals.
In North America there was rain, so much of it that in New York City the subway stations flooded. Dive teams had to be called in to evacuate people from their homes in Illinois. There was hail the size of baseballs in Montana, a landslide in Ohio, cyclones over the Atlantic. It was the tail end of one of those storms that had swept across Ireland, ripping the roofs off schools and football stadiums. Trees were uprooted, weather buoys unmoored. But still, we were lucky, people said. It could have been worse.
In the days that followed, the army was called in to help clear the debris from the roads. Electricity repair crews worked night and day to restore power to thousands of homes. Loss adjustors inspected the damage to property, while scientists lined up to blame global warming. Amid all this activity, one thing went unnoticed. It was happened upon purely by chance, by a man out walking his dog on the beach. The man wasn’t quite sure what it was that he had found, but he at least had the wit to tell someone about it. Thus was the enormity of his discovery understood and eventually made public. What the storm had exposed was an ancient drowned forest.
The first newspaper to cover the story was the Connacht Tribune. A regional paper of long and distinguished standing, the Tribune’s newsroom was located in the city of Galway, and it was there that a young reporter took a call about the strange find. Glad of a chance to escape the office, the reporter drove the dozen miles out the coast road to the location described. The dog walker was waiting for him there, with barely contained excitement. It might have been a mutilated body he’d found and not some dead trees. The reporter changed into his wellies, which he kept in the boot of his car, and together they trudged across a muddy field to the beach.
At first it wasn’t much to see. The trees were no more than stumps, barely a foot high. The stumps stood knee-deep in the wet sand like a ghostly, decapitated army. It was only when you hunkered down close to the sand that you were taken by the beauty of them. The grain of the wood was clearly visible, tiger-striped in some places, rounding into whorls in others. The reporter had no knowledge of natural history, but he knew that he was in the presence of something marvellous.
Back in the office, he made a few calls and gleaned some facts. His article was filed later that day, in plenty of time for the paper’s weekly deadline. The lead story was about a delay to the start of a building project at the local hospital. The second lead was a court case involving a solicitor who’d defrauded his clients of their money. The story about the drowned trees featured prominently on page 3. Occupying more space than the article itself was the photograph the picture editor had commissioned from a local freelance. The photograph showed the dog owner in the background, with his head bent down to look at the ground as he walked. The drowned trees were in the foreground, in all their magnificence.
The ink on the Tribune was barely dry before the Irish Times picked up on the story. They posted it on their website and from there it travelled far and wide. It was a rare ‘good’ weather story and, as such, gratefully received by newspapers all over the world. Among those to feature it was the venerable Guardian newspaper in Britain. The Guardian also ran the story on page 3, under the headline ‘Summer storm lays bare ancient forest’. They used the same photograph, diligently credited and paid for. It was a picture story if ever there was one. A quiet miracle, in a world full of noise.
Part One
1
Christo might so easily have missed it. He was not in the habit of buying a daily newspaper, although he would sometimes browse the leftovers scattered on a sofa table in the fellows’ drawing room after dinner. He liked to start the day with a clear head, cycling into college without listening to the news on the radio. Without speaking to a soul.
This particular day was a Saturday, the last of the summer. It wasn’t even ten in the morning, but already the punts were out on the river. The tourists reclined with self-conscious indolence in the dank bellies of the boats, as scruffy youths poled them inexpertly under the low bridges. Among them was one of Christo’s more feckless students.
‘Hello,’ the student called out to him, straightening up from the knees as his punt emerged on the far side of the bridge.
Leaving one hand in sole charge of the handlebars, Christo raised the other hand in the air and gave a hearty wave. The student paused to wave back, rocking his boat as he did so and causing his passengers to collapse into each other in a heap of giggles. Christo cycled on, feeling inordinately pleased to have been greeted in such a manner. A pleasure that had a whoosh to it, it sent him flying along the final stretch of his journey, with his tweed jacket flapping behind him. For a moment, he had the sense that he belonged in the world. A feeling as rare to him as it was precious, he rode it as far as it would go.
Approaching the college, he hopped down off his bicycle without stopping it and ended up running alongside it, as if it were a horse he was trying to restrain. He managed somehow to bring it to heel without catching his ankle on the pedal. Without getting his trouser leg caught in the chain. Master of his environment, he locked the bicycle deftly to the rack and, draping the strap of his satchel across his chest, swung through the college gates. Under the arch and out of the yellow light into the stony gloom of the porter’s lodge, where he stopped to peek into his pigeonhole, which was empty as usual.
‘Dr Jones,’ said the porter, pausing at his tasks. He looked out of his hatch, glaring at Christo over his reading glasses, as if he were the don and Christo the porter. The buoyancy of the bicycle journey was lost, and Christo was reduced to being an impostor again.
‘Good morning, Mr King,’ said Christo, struggling not to be cowed.
Mr King raised a finger, as if he had just remembered something.
‘I have something for you,’ he said, looking down at his desk. His tone suggested a rebuke.
‘Oh?’ said Christo. Aware of some transgression, though what it was that he’d done wrong he could not have said. So many rules here, he was walking on eggshells. Walking on grass that should not be walked on. Wearing a robe he should not have been wearing.
Christo had first come to Cambridge as an undergraduate, but he’d never acquired the ease of the place. Just as he’d never stopped being a new boy at his boarding school, even though he’d spent nearly five years there. He’d been a late arrival, landing like a poor, bruised windfall midway through the autumn term. The headmaster had ushered him into the classroom and the lesson had fallen silent, the boys all turning in their chairs to stare at him with open hostility. Christo felt like he’d been trapped in that moment ever since.
‘Dr Singh asked me to pass this on to you,’ said Mr King, handing Christo the previous day’s copy of the Guardian. It had a yellow Post-it on the front with Christo’s name on it. A page reference to an article Dr Singh wanted to bring to his attention. ‘It wouldn’t fit in your pigeonhole.’
‘How kind,’ said Christo, feeling foolish and relieved
He tucked the newspaper under his arm and plunged into the stairwell. Breathing in the smell of dry old wood, he took the narrow, creaking stairs two at a time. Only when he was alone in his study, with the door closed behind him, did he become aware of his own breathing, fast and shallow. The feeling, a familiar one, of having escaped from a barrage of gunfire. It was only when he was alone that Christo ever felt truly safe.
He sat down at his desk. The college buildings were silent around him, but for the summer-weekend sound of tourists wandering in awe through the Old Court. The absence of students was a sorrow to Christo. He missed the youthful shouts that filled the air outside in term time. The rumble of their giddy feet on the staircase as they arrived for supervision. Those were the times when Christo was happiest, with the chairs drawn into a loose circle in his rooms and a pot of tea on the desk. A pack of Walker’s shortbread fingers spread out on a plate – Christo liked to think the biscuits would be remembered with fondness long after the mathematics had been forgotten. In the discussions that followed, there was the beauty of a shared interest. An illusion of comradeship that dissolved as soon as the students traipsed back down the stairs. When Christo saw them in the dining hall it was from the high table where he sat with the other fellows, and they seemed so far removed from him as to be not so much the product of a different generation as a different species altogether. Every summer they disappeared, only to be replaced in the autumn by a younger batch, while Christo grew measurably older, year upon year. The effect of this was to make him feel like a rock in the middle of a river, with the water flowing endlessly by him.
The sun fought its way through the wobbly old windowpane, casting dust motes in a stage light as Christo settled down to work. He spent the next hour making notes for a lecture he was preparing on the logarithmic spiral. Spira mirabilis, it was also known as, for its miraculous ingenuity. As proof of this miracle, Christo had prepared a slide show depicting the many manifestations of the spiral in the natural world. The images he had chosen were: a cross section of a nautilus shell, the arms of the Milky Way, a cyclone over Cuba and a head of Romanesco broccoli. A final slide showed a photograph of a Danish pastry, which Christo planned to flash up as a joke. He hoped people would laugh. He worried they wouldn’t.
‘Of course they’ll laugh,’ he told himself. ‘It’s funny!’
He stood up and crossed the room to fill the kettle from the tap in the corner. As he waited for it to boil, he took out the day-old copy of the Guardian and studied the front-page photograph of forest fires raging in the Amazon. There was a teaser on the masthead for an interview with someone called Taylor Swift. A travel feature on the ‘Top 10 breaks in Britain for nature lovers’.
Sitting back down at the desk with his mug of tea, Christo turned the page. It was the headline that caught his attention first, rather than the photograph, although afterwards it would be the photograph that most absorbed him. According to the short, three-column article below the headline, the drowned forest was seven and a half thousand years old, but its existence had only been revealed by the recent storm. The picture showed the trunks rising out of the shallows. The severed stumps had been worn smooth by the water until they were as round as ankle bones. The oily grain of the wood was clearly visible in the picture. Also visible was the figure of a man in the background, walking over a beach of grey stones. Christo checked the caption, but there was no indication of where exactly the beach was located, or what it was called, only the name of the nearest village.
Christo looked up at the clock on the wall to check the time before picking up the phone to call his sister. His blood was bubbling with nerves as he started rehearsing what he would say, but she answered before he’d thought it through.
‘Christo?’
Her voice, as rich and deep as a hollow brass instrument. It never failed to sound a long, echoing note in his heart.
‘Cassie, did I wake you?’
Like a kidnap victim who’s been blindfolded and taken to an unknown location, he leaned his ear into the spaces created by the lag on the line and heard music from what he deduced to be a dance studio near her house. He detected the sound of light traffic and men’s laughter, stationary and unhurried. Christo pictured three of them sitting on plastic chairs at a nearby corner. Then came the sound of a street vendor’s bicycle horn, parp, parp, parp. A radio pumping out pop music, punctuated by the presenter’s voice speaking rapid-fire, excitable Spanish.
‘Christo, is everything okay?’
He could hear her breath coming fast and shallow in the expectation of bad news.
‘Everything’s fine,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to tell you. They’ve found Margo’s trees.’
2
That was where it all started for Christo. He’d just turned thirteen when Margo took them up the knobbly old mountain beyond the village and told them about the trees. Cassie was with them, and Seamus was there too, but not Jim. In Christo’s memory, his mother was also absent, which didn’t mean she wasn’t there, only that he had no memory of her, and there was nobody he could ask. It was a problem he and Cassie regularly encountered.
‘Where did you live in London?’
She was a teenager when she first asked him this, seizing on the sliver of life he’d had before she was born. She was jealous that he’d had their mother all to himself before she arrived.
‘I don’t know,’ he would say.
He’d been a baby then. He had no memory of it.
‘How old were you when you moved to the States?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Christo would say. ‘One? Maybe two?’
‘Where did you live?’
There was no end to her capacity for asking questions. As a child she’d had an endless supply of them. It was exhausting.
‘Cassie Koenig,’ their mother used to say. ‘Never in my whole life have I met anyone who asks so many questions. It’s enough to drive a person stark-raving mad.’
Christo was two and a half when she was born, a lone entity until her arrival introduced the concept of relativity. ‘You’re a big brother now,’ he was told. It was only when he was measured against her that he was found to be so. ‘Big brother,’ he repeated, like a mantra, as if by doing so he could convince himself that this was the case, when the truth was that she took up more space in the world than he did, with her big head and her big eyes and her big demands on everyone’s attention. His first memory of her was of a crib that occupied the centre of the living room. Someone must have picked him up and shown her to him. Someone must have explained to him what she was, but he had no memory of it. She was no more than an alien presence, unseen by him and unwanted. Christo couldn’t understand why everyone was so pleased by her arrival.
He was three when he discovered he could make her laugh. Up until then Christo had never imagined that he had it within himself to be funny, but that raucous baby laughter of hers cast a bright stage light over him, and he woke up to the comedian inside himself. All he had to do was look at her and she laughed. She laughed until her belly wobbled and her head collapsed on her shoulders. Sometimes she brought on a fit of hiccups from laughing so much. One time she laughed so much that she fell over, right where she was sitting on her play mat. Ever since then, there had been inside Christo a person who could make his sister laugh so hard that she’d fall over. Anytime she was in need of cheering up, he would remind her of it.
‘Sometimes you laughed so much the snot came out your nose.’
Cassie would squirm with pleasure. She loved to hear stories about herself.
‘Tell me about the time I ate all your Hallowe’en candy,’ she might say.
‘Well, that wasn’t just the one time.’
‘Tell me, anyway.’
As a child, Cassie had a great lust for life. Any treat that was going, any opportunity for adventure, she was the girl with her hand up to say, ‘Me! Me! Me!’ A queue-jumper par excellence, Cassie saw no harm in putting herself to the fore of things. This monstrous capacity for self-advancement was so natural to her that it was somehow endearing. Christo had been saddened in recent years to see it fade, a more subdued sister coming to live in the skin of the old one. This sister was increasingly preoccupied by all the pieces she was missing from the past.
