The Trick of the Ga Bolga, page 22
A heather bee hummed momentarily and was gone. Consolata kissed him and said that she was both hungry and thirsty. After swimming ashore, they shared a bottle of milk and a dozen crab claws, breaking the brown and white shells against a rock. His body tingled after the cold of the water. Across from them the green island looked smaller now, as if the weight of their naked bodies had flattened it.
“I’ve lost my ring.” She woke him from his reverie.
“I didn’t know you were wearing it.”
“I had it in my pocket, I put it on my finger before we went into the water.”
“It wasn’t the right thing to do. It was meant only for the lower middle class of Sligo.”
They searched and searched. When they failed to find it, she wanted to swim out to the island again.
“No, leave it where it is. Can’t you see that it’s the best place for it.”
“You say the strangest things.” She sounded hurt.
“If we go to the island and fail to find it, we shall have lost it forever. If we don’t go, it will still be ours. It may even tempt us back another day.”
“It was my first real ring. The only other ring I ever had was made of hay—what we call a sealán.”
“Don’t worry, it was only trumpery. There are plenty more in Sligo.”
“We’re not very lucky, are we? You lost your best pipe and I lost my only ring.”
“These things are not important,” he told her.
“Important or not, it’s ruined a lovely day.”
They left the lough with the mysterious island, thinking how hard it was to imagine either island or lough now that their backs were turned. As they came in sight of the road, they gazed down the glen on Garaross, a valley within a valley under the evening sun with a winking sea beyond. Home looked far away, a place apart. It seemed to him that the journey back might be fraught with all sorts of unexpected obstacles.
“I’ll race you to the road.” She took off down the slope like a fawn.
He stood looking at Screig Beefan, now oddly unfamiliar in profile because of the sharp angle. To his surprise, he could not see the Tower or Glen Head. He knew that they were there, as the island and the lough were there. Knowing was not enough; in his heart was a kernel of uncertainty, as if things he had considered inevitable were demonstrably no longer so.
“Coward!” she called up from below.
He bounded down the hillside, jumping drains and clumps of rushes, fleet and surefooted, until he tripped on a horned stump of bog-wood.
“I think I’ve twisted my ankle,” he called to her.
“I know your tricks, you only want to catch me.”
When she saw him limping, she waited. By the time they reached the quarry in which he’d hidden his bicycle, he felt irritable and tired. Luckily, the road home was downhill, so he didn’t have to do much pedalling. Consolata bathed and bandaged his ankle, which was now as big as an oak-gall. Timideen offered to perform the sprain-cure, claiming to be the only man in the townland who knew the relevant incantation, Coote ignored him.
He could not understand why he felt uneasy. It wasn’t because of the pain in his ankle, and it wasn’t because of Timideen’s tongue-in-cheek offer to cure it. He turned in early, only to find that whenever he closed his eyes the same unanswerable question erupted in the dark. What if Consolata should become pregnant? He had never asked the question before and he could not imagine why he was asking it now. It was as if he were intent on worrying and was prepared to worry about the first thing that came to mind.
He spent the following morning hobbling about the house. In the afternoon he stood for half an hour outside the barn in the rain, which slanted sharply before a south wind, stinging cleanly, cleansing his neck and face, while the wind brushed each running drop away. At nightfall he sat by the kitchen window looking at a half-moon racing. A cloud approached, a dark, spread-eagled figure in a hat, which seemed to look down at him, floating freely with arms and legs outstretched. He could make out the “progress” of the moon behind it from the pale orange glow running along its back. Then came a subtle change. The hat melted. The figure was no longer a man. Neither was it a woman but something dark and mysterious in between.
A hand shook him by the shoulder. He’d fallen asleep. Imelda had come in with a bowl.
“I dreamt that I was in a cradle being rocked by an invisible woman.” He smiled.
“The cow calved this morning. I’ve brought you some of the beestings.”
“What on earth is that?”
“They’re the first milkings of a cow after calving. They’re very strong, they’ll put the colour back in your cheeks.”
She boiled them in a saucepan till they thickened, but one look at them was enough for him.
“I think you’d better give them to the Proker’s tomcat. He might think they’re scrambled eggs,” he said.
“You’re tired. I’ll turn down the sheets, and while you’re getting into bed, I’ll make you a cup of tea.”
Propped against the pillows, he listened to her shuffling tread on the floor flags in the kitchen. She came up with a mug and sat by the bed while he drank the strong, sweet brew, which reminded him of senna pods and other childhood medicines. When he had finished, she placed the mug on a chair and leaned across the bed to tuck him in, her breast close to his face, her loose hair hanging forward revealing the bare nape of her neck. His head swam. He touched the underside of her left breast with his hand. She kissed him on the lips with her hair on his forehead.
It was a return to a warmer world, to soothing words and comforts long forgotten. She lay beside him with the covers between them. After a while she got in under the covers and lay on top of him, blinding him with a hot sleet of kisses. Gradually, the kisses grew gentle, while the movement of her body below took on an undeniable urgency. She flung back the bedclothes. He rolled over on top of her, and in the same moment found her. There was simply no time for the labyrinthine elaborations of the Ga Bolga.
She rose against him, arching her back, gripping him and kneading him, while her breath came in short spurts through her nose, hot as a tropical night on his cheek. A step in the kitchen made him turn his head.
“I made porridge for your supper.” Consolata came through the door.
She dropped the bowl where she stood. He opened his mouth as she melted from sight.
“Don’t stop,” cried Imelda. “You can’t leave me halfway across the river.”
“You left the door open,” he said, when at last she had found the elusive point of rest. “I suppose you just didn’t care.”
“She’s got to grow up some time, she can’t remain a schoolgirl forever.”
He watched her smooth her dress. He was lying on his back with an indeterminate figure at each end of the bed, one tugging at his head, the other at his feet. Chance and necessity: torture by traction. Six weeks of idyllic love had ended.
“It was a careless thing to do,” he said, as she laced her shoes.
“No good would have come of it. She lives in a different world from you and me.”
After a time she went to the window and said: “It’s raining bullock-stirks out. I’ll be drenched by the time I’m home.”
Chapter 10
The night passed slowly, he hardly slept. Once, between tossing and turning, he dreamt that a large, black snail had come out of a hole in the wall and was making for his bed. He watched its painful progress from his pillow, knowing that it was a messenger with a deeply oracular message for him alone. Halfway across the floor it turned to look at its shell. Two horns swayed in hesitation. Then slowly it crept back along the slimy track to the hole in the unpainted skirting. He tried to speak. He tried to raise himself in the bed. He found that he was immobilised on his back, gagged and bound and powerless in every limb.
In the morning, as he put on one shoe, he noticed a snail’s slime reaching halfway across the floor from the opposite wall, and he wondered if he’d really been dreaming or if he’d watched it in the moonlight, half awake. He got a damp cloth from the kitchen and rubbed till the slime had gone, telling himself that he wasn’t superstitious, that he simply didn’t like snails.
As he was lighting the fire, Timideen, rheumy-eyed, dishevelled and unshaven, put his head in the door.
“Have you seen Consolata?” he asked.
“No.”
“She said she was going to bring you supper last night. I fell asleep after she left, and when I woke this morning, she wasn’t in her room.”
“She brought me a bowl of porridge about eleven and left before I’d eaten it. It’s a bright morning. Perhaps she went for a walk on the Rosheens.”
“Her bed hasn’t been slept in.”
“It’s odd,” said Coote, as Timideen left.
He carried out the hot ashes in an old bucket and dumped them in a corner of the garden. He boiled an egg which he could not bring himself to top. German planes dropped eggs and German submarines laid them. On his second day in Garaross, Imelda sent Helen to ask him if he’d like a brown egg or a white egg, and one evening on the way home from Skelpoona, Consolata said, “There’s little scrapin’ in a bantam’s egg.” Just before closing time in The Lamb and Flag, Philip Woodwind told him that he lived in an egg, that he lacked the necessary egg tooth to break the shell. He pretended not to hear, and, as they said good-night opposite the Garrick Club, Woodwind sneered, “All eggs, including yours, are laid by females. Think of that, dear Coote, think of that.” One of Imelda’s hens began eating her own eggs. Imelda killed the hen and invited him to Sunday lunch. So as not to offend her, he said that he had to go out to Carrick and only went as far as Lough Unshagh. He would never eat another egg as long as he lived.
“Oh, oh, no!”
The howl of anguish seemed to come from the throat of a man in the throes of violent death. With his heart the weight of a turnip in his chest, Coote limped to the door. Timideen ran from the barn with both hands to his face. Staggering across the yard, he collapsed between two buckets on the plank that served as a crude stand outside the door.
“What on earth’s happened?” Coote asked.
“I’ll flay the man that did it … I’ll skin him alive … The girl who never hurt a fly.”
Coote went to the barn door. An ugly black rat slithering down the potato heap was what he saw with his eyes, but the sickening knowledge that she was hanging from the couple entered his body like poison at every pore. A kind of liquid had trickled down her leg. His skull felt light, as if the brain inside had dried away. He backed against the door for support and reached for a rusty pair of sheep shears on the wall. He barely knew what he was doing. Her hand was heavy and cold. The overturned chair beneath her was the one he himself had broken the night the Proker came a cropper. He managed to place a ladder against the tie beam of the couple, and slowly and painfully hauled himself up without looking at her face.
He held her against his body with one hand and chewed at the string with the blunt shears. It was lobster-pot string left by Cormac. It reeked of bark. Now the smell seemed to rise from her hair. She moved away from him. As he reached out, the ladder slid across the tie beam. He grabbed her waist and both of them fell to the floor. Outside, Timideen was making choking noises. Her face was unrecognisable, her body strangely thick. He felt his ankle and heard Ned Curran’s deep-throated voice in the yard.
“I’ll shoot the man who did it, I’ll shoot him like a marauding dog,” Timideen wailed.
Ned Curran carried the body down the road to Timideen’s and laid it on the bed that had not been slept in. He put a towel over her face and said to Coote: “He’ll never get over it. He doted on her every day of her life, he thought she was still a child.”
“I can’t imagine what came over her,” Coote heard himself speak. “She brought me some porridge before bedtime. She was making fun of me for being so helpless. After that she never went back home.”
“Why did she hang herself in your barn?” Ned Curran took a side-glance at Coote.
“She knew I’d turned in for the night and that her father was still up. Perhaps she didn’t want to be disturbed.”
“You could be right.” Ned Curran pulled thoughtfully on his Woodbine.
Coote felt weak at the knees. In his skull was a black fog that spread icily along his nervous system, and through the fog fled shrieking phantoms without faces. He could tell that they were shrieking though his ears were stopped. Now there was nothing, not even sound, to distract him from the knowledge that emptiness ached.
The day before yesterday he had pursued her from the shore to the grassy island, her legs lanky, her body white. Then it seemed as if he’d achieved the plateau of life that stretches into the horizon, sleepily and dreamily, until body finally fails soul. Now he knew that he had not just lost Consolata but a way of talking and not talking, of waking in the morning and going to bed at night, a way of hearing and seeing, of thinking and feeling, because in the last few weeks she had surrounded him as the sea surrounded Garaross itself.
“I’ll go for the priest,” Ned Curran said.
“If it weren’t for my ankle, I’d fetch Sergeant Blowick.”
“On a day like this a sprained ankle is a very sane complaint. Don’t worry, I’ll tell Blowick while I’m out. You keep an eye on Timideen and don’t let him do anything foolish.”
Two black-shawled women went straight to the bedroom. He hobbled across the road, aware of their whispering. “Why did she hang herself in your barn?” Ned Curran’s question was bound to be the first of many. Each questioner would have his own theory and each would seek the answer that accorded with his theory. Imelda was turning the corner at the Deán, back from Cashel with light shopping. He waited and told her, the words neutral, headstones in a graveyard, the very language dead.
“No one must know that I was with you last night.” She said “I” and “You” but not “She,” because “She” was just an inconvenience. He hated her matter-of-factness. He could have struck her across the mouth. Instead he looked at Screig Beefan, mute but not long-suffering, in a tunic of ferns that concealed a heart of stone.
“People might put two and two together,” she reminded him.
“You speak as if we’re guilty.” He could not bring himself to look at her.
“I’m not guilty, I’m just afraid. Garaross is a small place, we live in one another’s pockets. When gossip starts, no one can tell where it will end. Will you promise not to mention my name?”
Her words were jarring sounds. He did not answer.
“You have nothing to lose, you can go away. I was born here, and so was my husband. My daughter is only a child.”
He left her and sat beside Timideen on the plank. He had his head against the wall, staring unseeingly, shrunken and brittle inside loose clothes. Coote gave him a glass of whiskey, which he drank so swiftly that he dared not give him another.
Father McNullis came and whispered well-worn words of comfort before going into the wake-house. Sergeant Blowick came and talked for what seemed an eternity. Timideen hardly replied, and when Coote told his story, he did not mention Imelda. Afterwards his spittle was thick and foul-tasting. It formed a kind of phlegm in his throat that caused him to retch. He made tea, only to find that he couldn’t drink it, so he swallowed two stiff whiskeys and sat again beside Timideen on the plank. Imelda came down the road and placed a hand on Timideen’s sleeve.
“She’s laid out now,” she said. “You don’t have to sit here anymore.”
In the afternoon Dr. McNelis, the priest’s brother, came. The women filed out of the bedroom and he spent twenty minutes alone with the body. The women made tea. Men knelt in prayer beside the coffin and went away. Their talk was strained. A mould had been broken. Even fishing and farming had lost their authenticity.
Coote went home at midnight. He hadn’t eaten since morning, so he put a piece of cold fish on a plate and stared at it, as he waited for the kettle to boil. He was glad that he had found the heel of a loaf in the bread bin; the thought of eating homemade bread that had been kneaded by his own hand filled him with nausea and dread.
He ate the crust and then the white heart. He could not face the fish. It was a small pollack he had killed in Skelpoona, while she sat on a rock behind him. Its flesh was white like her body in Lough Divna. He rose from the table and left the plate outside the door for the Proker’s tomcat in the morning. Abruptly, he changed his mind without knowing why. He made a hollow in the heart of the fire and dropped the fish into it. Then he sat at the table drinking watery tea with a film of fine dust floating on its surface.
He lay awake on his back in bed, the vacuum in his mind and body too great for innocent sleep to fill. The night passed and with morning came the comfort of light. He was walking in the country. A trout fisherman in a Norfolk jacket was casting upriver with a wicker creel on the bank beside him, the water like quicksilver in the early sun. The rod curved at the tip. She laughed and said, “A rise.” He began telling her about wet fly and dry, and his heart leaped as he recognised the river for the Torridge. He opened his eyes and looked for the snail’s slime. His mind and body were a fire of pain that he could not comprehend. Then the knowledge that she was dead came up through the mattress and entered his body with the force of a thousand spikes thrusting.
After milking, he went back to the wake-house and saw her face for the first time. A black ribbon covered the mark on her neck. Her cheeks were firm, her eyebrows closer than he remembered. The face was a face in a painting seen from a distance without dancing light. It had a still finality, like his memory of her in Carraig na nlolar, Skelpoona and Lough Divna in the sun.
He sat beside the bed all morning without raising his eyes. Again, men and women came to pray. He did not move. He spoke to no one because he had nothing to say. They did not try to draw him out. News must have got round that he was too stunned to talk. Once or twice Timideen looked in, put a trembling hand on his shoulder, and quietly withdrew.
