LOVE’S DOORWAY TO LIFE: FICTIONS

A Written Creative Work submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University < In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree JO!} CO Master of Fine Arts

In

Creative Writing

by

Andrew Gavin Murphy

San Francisco, California

May 2017 Copyright by Andrew Gavin Murphy 2017 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read Love’s Doorway to Life: Fictions by Andrew Gavin Murphy, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.

M Peter Omer Professor of Creative Writing

Michelle Carter Professor of Creative Writing LOVE’S DOORWAY TO LIFE: FICTIONS

Andrew Gavin Murphy San Francisco, California 2017

A collection of fictions based in and around the north of Ireland, interwoven with the author’s personal history in Ireland and the United States.

I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this written creative work.

S '/9 /± T_ Chair, Thesis Committee Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author wishes to thank all the faculty of the Creative Writing and English

Department at San Francisco State University for their generosity inside the classroom.

He also wishes to thank his fellow graduate and undergraduate students who provided inspiration, peer support, and creative validation. Finally, the title of this manuscript is borrowed from Patrick Kavanagh’s poem, “Innocence.” TABLE OF CONTENTS

A Belfast Story...... 1

Godsend...... 8

Brogan on Adelaide Park...... 12

Empathy for the Unknown...... 20

Lavery’s Gin Palace, 1980...... 32

In the Conservatory...... 35

Our Eliza...... 37

PT-109...... 49

Climbing Slieve Gullion...... 51 1

A BELFAST STORY

July, 1972.1 was working as a cleaner for the Council, so I was. At the leisure centre by the old Gasworks. The one they tore down years ago. What was it called?

We were in the canteen for our afternoon tea break. I grabbed Bridie McClain’s wrist and wouldn’t let go. I’d left the washing out, I told her. There was no milk in the house, I said to Bridie, and if Howard Orr closed up his newsagents we’d have none for our tea in the morning.

Something like thirty bombs in an hour. Bridie’s long dead from the cancer, so she is. Probably from all the asbestos coming down when that building thumped like a rug being struck by God’s broom.

A month or two later Father McManus called in to our flat. We thought we were pretty much living in the city centre, but Father McManus said it was still the lower Falls. This was after trying the Antrim Road. Before that it was a wee flat off the Woodstock Road. Anything we could afford was on one side or the other, and neither side wanted us. Father McManus said we’d be doing everybody a good turn if we moved on. He said he couldn’t protect us. I said I want to have babies, Father, and he said you best be having them somewhere else.

The last place was that room in the Holy Lands, on Fitzroy Avenue, sharing a flat with a bunch of hippies. They’d sit around and smoke their blow, play their music. Van Morrison, they said, had crashed there once. They kept saying it, as if it were true. Their dopey smiles were a relief at first.

There was this Spanish girl in the house called Veda. Some fella named Hugh had gotten her pregnant and brought her back. Veda wasn’t her real name, but she loved that malted veda bread they sell only at home, so that’s what we called her. She had no English at all. Must’ve been seven, eight months pregnant. Ready to burst, so she was.

The only time I saw her lose herself was when she was eating a big slice of toasted veda, gobs of butter dribbling off. She’d take a bite and blow air out her nose, as if even breathing would ruin the taste. The rest of the time she was sat on the settee, her 2

Hugh off his head on something and strumming his guitar. Veda’s eyes darting around like a blue-arsed fly.

Then comes the day when my Liam brings home two tickets for the ferry to Liverpool. You’d seen me watching Veda, you said. I looked more scared than the pregnant Spanish girl, you said.

It was only later I learned that vida means “life” in Spanish. Her baby would be a year older than our Karen now. But Veda left, too. We were sure of it.

“You’d have to be away with the fairies to stick that loony bin,” I used to say.

“Away back home to sunny Spain with you, Veda,” you’d say, as if she were still in the room with us.

I should feel lucky, the doctor said, that you haven’t gotten...what was the word he used? Aggravated?

Remember that barman in San Diego, on our holiday? The man from Dungannon?

“So what part of Belfast you from then?” he asked.

“What the fuck’s it to you, mate.”

That’s the only time I’ve ever seen you walk away from a full pint.

“Five thousand miles away,” you said later, in the hotel, “and they still want to pitch a flag on your head.”

“Or paint the flag on you like a kerbstone,” I said. “You finally went and said it, luv.”

“Aye,” you said, “being five thousand miles away helps.”

“And doesn’t,” I said.

That time we came back for Willy McCausland’s funeral, 2010 was it? He was always good to you, Willy. The reception was in that bar in Ballyhackamore. All silver furniture and neon. Suppose some things do change in Belfast, but a pub should not have a television as big as your living room wall. 3

“When’s the film start,” you whispered in my ear, and I couldn’t stop giggling. “Where’s the popcorn,” you said.

Oh, Liam, sometimes I forget how much we laughed. You used to say I was the only woman who came back from holiday with a sunburnt tongue. I could always talk for Ireland, but never thought it would be my job to remember.

Emma, the saint, had Mum by then. She’d taken to her bed in the spare room, shifting only when Emma and Charlie turned her to bathe and replace the bed clothes.

Guess that’s one upside to me and Mum. Sometimes I wonder, God forgive me, if that’s all she was waiting for. Why she’d stuck it out for ninety-four years. Just waiting for her wee Lucy to come back and wipe her arse. Her way of saying that’s what you get for marrying a Catholic.

Emma never asked if I wanted to see her while I was back. She talked about Mum, told me how she was doing, but never as much as twitched her chin to suggest I call on her.

We had time to kill before the flight. Driving away from Willy’s funeral, you asked me if I wanted to drive by St. Mathew’s, or maybe have some lunch in town.

“Just take me to the airport,” I said.

And that’s what you did. We dropped off the rental and sat there, six hours before the flight. And we waited. We waited to leave. My knees were up and down like a fiddler’s elbow. I didn’t get up to pee even, and you knew to say nothing. You knew not to be cheeky. You knew not to grab my knee, to try to steady it.

“You’re awfully quiet,” is all you said, your Jimmy Stewart smile as sly as the day is long.

When I look at you now, it’s like you’re still waiting on me to laugh at that joke. Is that why this has happened to you and not me? Because you’re the patient one?

I told you about it that first night we met. At the Orpheus? You’ll shake your head like you don’t, but you remember. When I found Daddy’s banknotes under the mattress and started playing shopkeeper with Emma? We thought they were tiny newspapers.

“Latest news from France!” I shouted, holding a banknote over my head with both hands. “Hitler’s on his heels!” 4

Emma used stones for coins, Liam. She bought banknotes with stones we’d find in the middle of Shankill Road and shined with our skirt tails.

I told you all this after we danced. After you pulled out a five pound note to buy me a Coke. I hadn’t seen one of those since that day playing with Emma. That’s why I told you all about it. Or maybe I was just nervous after you told me your name.

Mum thumped us. She thumped us a lot, but I remember that one, so I do. It was Daddy’s money from his settlement. From his accident at the shipyard. Mum thumped us because she knew she could never have that money. She thumped us like she knew Daddy would have thumped her if she’d spent a pence of it on matches.

Oh, Liam, we danced that night. Remember? Late August, 1960. At the Orpheus. Liam and Lucy. Lucy and Liam.

Remember? Walking through the city centre after, to catch the tram?

Oh, we ain’t got a barrel of money

Maybe we’re ragged and funny...

When I realized I was the only one singing, I turned around. There you were, standing and listening, arms crossed. I still see that look in you now. It’s like you’re waiting on something, and you don’t care how long it takes.

This one, I told our Emma, is going to be trouble. A world and a half of trouble, I said. He’s so quiet, you don’t even know he’s there.

If you want to talk about trouble, you need look no further than when Uncle Walter came around with his car. You could hear it even before it turned the comer where wee Agnes, the crippled girl, lived with her granny. Even old Jimmy Watson, who wouldn’t cross the door for his own funeral, parted his front curtain to have a jook at our Walter’s motor.

Daddy wouldn’t meet him at the door. That was Mum’s job. She’d show him into the sitting room, where Daddy’d be waiting, staring at the fire and rubbing his chin.

“Cup of tea in your hand?” Mum would ask Uncle Walter. 5

“Tea! Give this man a drink!”

Mum would have to scramble if there was no whiskey in the house. She’d send us down to Madden’s to get a half pint if Daddy had drunk it all. We’d come charging in, pinching the two bob Mum had given us between our thumb and forefinger and waving it about.

“Our Uncle Walter’s here!”

“Sending the wee’uns into a public house for his own drink,” Big Dye Johnstone would say into his pint. “Has the man no shame?”

Never heard much talk coming from that sitting room, so I didn’t. The kitchen door didn’t close properly, so we’d have a nosy through the crack. Daddy’d be slumped in his chair. You’d think he was sleeping if he wasn’t trying to dig his chin into his chest. Uncle Walter would have his back to us, leaning forward to talk to Daddy. He sounded more like a pot of potatoes on the boil than a man talking to his older brother.

Mum would send us out the house once Daddy and Uncle Walter were settled. But Daddy thumped her for not having us there to say goodbye. Not like himself ever got out of his own chair, mind you. Mum would then try to scoot us out the door as soon as Uncle Walter left, waving and chasing after his car. But that didn’t work either. Daddy would have her fetch us. Where could we to go, like? It was all for naught. Even if we came back, hours later, looking for our tea, Daddy would still be steaming in that chair. It was worse, so it was, if he’d had some time to really get thinking and drink the rest of that half pint.

“No dinner for you’s until you earn your keep!”

Door to door, up and down the Shankill. Every door on the block. If we’d no yam, we’d tear some off our hems or cuffs.

Twigs and yam, Liam. You’ve heard this all before. The same stuff I’d pretend to sell to Emma when we played shop, and he had us hocking it to the neighbors. I was eleven. I knew what pretending was and what pretending was not.

Wee Agnes’s granny would open the door and shake her head. She’d grab Emma’s wrist to press a copper into her damp palm.

“Damn that man all to hell,” she’d say.

“Bastard,” you’d say. 6

Daddy was a lot of things, but he was no bigot. He was long dead by the time we had to face facts with Mum. Where she got all that hate, I’ll never know. Maybe it was raising nine children with Daddy not lifting a pinkie.

Suppose she never got past your name: Liam McDonough. But what was I to do? Make something up? “Mum, I’d like you to meet Mr. Alistair Houston.” Aye, that would’ve worked. Mum was many things, but she wasn’t stupid.

There’s no hiding in Belfast anyway. Remember being back for Willy’s funeral, and that taxi driver?

“So you’s in Liverpool for the work then?” he asked.

“Aye,” you said.

“Where’d you say you’re from again?”

“Left long ago, mate.”

“But you went to school here, aye?”

On and on it goes, until they have you cornered. Unlike San Diego, you held your tongue.

Once she’d caught wind, Mum wouldn’t let me leave the house. I was allowed to go to work, at Gallaher’s up on York Street. Probably because she still wanted all them free cigarettes they gave out on Fridays. But she knew as much as anyone it was all girls at the factory. Outside of work, I was a prisoner. I’d found a man who didn’t drink, had a good job. What’s a girl to do?

Thank goodness Emma was already married. I moved in with her and Charlie. They were the happiest and most unhappy times. Emma and I still joke that the only reason we got married was to have our own bed. He’s a good man, Emma’s Charlie. A straight-shooter if there ever was one.

Still can’t believe we tied the knot at St. Mathew’s. Who decided that again? They’d soon be shooting at each other on that very ground. Protestants and Catholics acting like flipping cowboys and Indians. I don’t care what your persuasion is, boys, but having a pitched battle at a church? Lunacy, so it is. 7

A breezy summer’s day. 1963. You in your gray wool suit. Mum and her five brothers standing out there on Bryson Street. She felt strong enough about it to march into the heart of the Short Strand, but only to stand across the street from the church. She wore black sunglasses and crossed her arms high on her chest. That’s the day I realized how tall she was. A good six to eight inches taller than any of her brothers. I didn’t get them genes, so I didn’t.

That’s the last I saw of her, after I crossed the door of St. Mathew’s a married woman. Before Charlie and Emma stepped in to block my view. You saw her, too, and tilted your head when you looked at me, like a dog waiting on scraps.

“I’ve got nothing for you,” I said.

There’s the one Mum when we were kids, standing watch over the oven, shooing us away when we came to see if her potato bread with Bramley apples was ready. Mum standing, hands on hips, shaking her head as we danced around the kitchen, as if keeping our feet off the floor would cool the flatbread in our hands. Mum handing us a glass of milk after we’d burned the roof off our mouths.

Then there’s that other Mum, the one on my wedding day. In a perfect line with her brothers, stiff and thick as a mob boss. Her curly hair not shifting in a warm summer gust, gray coming in at the temples. A rat’s nest of rust-colored hair. My hair. 8

GODSEND

I was already angry when I moved to the Holy Lands.

My girlfriend had left me, but more importantly, she’d left me for a guy in his forties with a big house in Helen’s Bay. Not much a guy can do about that except get angry. At the time, I thought the anger would be easier than pain, like I had a choice or something.

All I’m saying is that me moving to the Holy Lands is not what made me bitter. The foundation had already been laid.

Rosalyn and I had shared a flat off the Lisburn Road. I stayed on after she left because I didn’t know what else to do. But when they cut back on my hours at work, I had to find a cheaper place, sooner rather than later.

In hindsight, it was a Godsend. Sitting in that flat, drinking tin after tin of Miller, staring at the wall and thinking of Rozi - it was never going to end well.

I saw Sara’s advert in the window of the Spar on University Avenue. I’d been out on an aimless walk along the Lagan towpath and decided to cut back through the Holy Lands on my way home. I knew of an off-license that usually had lager on offer for the students.

The ad was straight-forward enough: Young professional needed to share house with same. No students. The price was right and I phoned her on my mobile straight away.

She asked me to call around to the house, which was right around the comer. She opened the door and it was all white hair and loose clothes. She put the kettle on. We sat down. I told her all about Rozi. 9

Don’t get me wrong: I’d already decided not to duck any questions about why I was looking for a place. Just never expected to go into such detail. I did so much of the talking that I didn’t realize Sara was American until she told me. She’d been ‘screwed over’ once too, she said, coming to Belfast about ten years ago with a guy she met in Seattle. He left her two years later for an eighteen year-old secretary from his work.

“I saw her once,” Sara said. “It was at a work do. Maybe they were going at it even then. Don’t know. She was all tits and orange legs. I kept thinking the idea of screwing her must’ve been better than the real thing. This was my only consolation.”

“Ever see him around?” I asked. This was my great fear with Rozi.

“Never,” Sara said. “Always used to complain about how small Belfast was, but thank God it’s been big enough for the two of us.”

I moved in a week and a half later.

Sara called herself a ‘Community Relations Officer’ for some voluntary organization doing work in Donegal Village. Not sure what that meant. She never talked much about work anyway. I never asked.

It was late summer and everything went well from the start. Sara and I became fast friends. She made dinner a couple times a week. I brought something back from the chippie now and then. We watched a lot of telly in the evenings after work and there was always some lager in the fridge. I never saw Sara drink anything but vodka and cranberry.

My favorite part about her was her hair, that thick unkempt mane flowing down below her shoulders. Her face was younger than the white hair would suggest. Less wrinkles than you’d think. Just one of those things. Genetic maybe.

She was always wearing some sort of loose skirt too. She was a hippy chick. A hippy chick from Seattle, so she was.

The trouble began when the students returned for autumn term. This happened the same time I got a letter from the Civil Service. I’d gone through the whole process of applying six months ago—all Rozi’s idea, if you can believe it—and the letter told me I had a post with the Planning Service. They needed audio typists and they needed them fast. 10

It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. A ‘job for life’, Rozi had said at the time. My current gig at the solicitor’s office in town was never going to amount to much. I was twenty-six, a couple of years too old not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

The big change was getting up at seven o’clock every morning. I’d only been working afternoons at the solicitor’s office and was enjoying the lie-in every morning.

And then the students returned. And they returned in force. Maybe you’ve read about it in the papers.

Ever since I’ve wondered whether autumn term was the worst: a whole new batch of eighteen year-olds living on their own for the first time? I never stuck around long enough to find out.

They all came home from the pub at the same time. They weren’t good singers. They played football and hurling in the street after 3am. They broke bottles a plenty. The girls screamed and squealed. The blokes shouted insults and said ‘fuck’ a lot. High heels sounded like the Queen’s entire entourage passing by in horse-drawn carriages. Did I mention they couldn’t sing?

And it was all Sunday through Thursday. Exactly the same nights I needed to sleep. Then you would see the little buggers walking down towards Botanic on a Thursday afternoon or evening, gym bags weighed down with dirty laundry. All of them on their way to catch a train or bus home to Mummy, to get a good feed or two and maybe end up with a few extra bob in their pocket. They’d be back at it in the Holy Lands Sunday night, right as rain. Our future, piss-drunk in the streets. Wee fuckers.

The first week I put up with it. Maybe I was tired from my change to a full-time schedule. Maybe I slept through more of it than I remember. Don’t know.

The second week it became unbearable. Sara was usually in bed when I went off to work, but one morning she was there in the kitchen just after seven, looking smarter than usual in a black skirt with a white blouse. Still a big drape of a thing. She had a conference to go to, she said. I complained about the noise. She didn’t say anything. She did peer intently over her mug of tea as she listened to my rage.

That night they were at it again. I was seething in my bed. All my muscles were tense as I lay on my back and looked up through the skylight of my small room. Then there was a knock at the door. It was Sara, dressed in a white night gown. She glowed in the moonlight coming through the skylight. She was holding something with both her hands. 11

“ Put some clothes on,” she said.

I got out of bed with just my boxers on. Sara stood there and watched, not moving at all. When I was dressed she handed me what turned out to be a carton of eggs. Then she stood on my bed and opened the dormer window. I saw the outline of Sara’s body through the nightgown as she expertly climbed out of the window. Thinner than I’d imagined, it has to be said.

When I poked my head out the skylight I found a wooden contraption on the slate roof. It was a lattice-work slung over the crest of the roof so the sloped roof could be easily navigated. I handed the eggs up to Sara, then climbed out myself and lay down next to her. Our heads very close together and we were just able to see over the crest of the roof.

“A partner in crime,” Sara said. “Finally.”

There were a couple of girls coming down our street, horseshoe heels on cobblestones.

Sara opened the carton of eggs towards me. When I looked up at her, she was smiling.

“Give ‘em a good lob,” she said, “so they don’t know where they’re coming from. And space out the attack. Lob a couple, and even if you don’t hit the jackpot, wait a few minutes so they’re not looking out for it. If we’re found out, the fun stops.”

The girls started singing Britney Spears. Hit Me Baby One More Time, if you can believe it.

I've never had so much fun being angry. 12

BROGAN ON ADELAIDE PARK

We have become a wee bit fond of it, that story of Moran coming home for Paddy Brogan’s funeral:

“You must be devastated,” the customs official at Dublin airport is believed to have said to Moran, the shaggy-dog professor from Harvard, who, on that day, was brave enough to call himself a poet.

We tell the story, I suppose, because we like to believe that only in Ireland will a customs official have a recently deceased poet on his mind. But all the good man had to do was read the papers—yes?

It is easy enough to see today, less than a decade after his death, what Brogan saw when he marched up the Lisburn Road in the summer of 1962, Belfast Telegraph in hand, to enquire about a bedsit on Adelaide Park. But as he turns off the busy commercial thoroughfare and onto the wide leafy street overseen by stately brick homes, does he breathe deep to taste the possibility of having, for the first time, his own place to write? Or is he simply composing himself before meeting his prospective landlord?

Number Fourteen Adelaide Park is owned by one Mr. Lightfoot, a man as tight with his money as he is strict in his religion. The retired general practitioner is tall, his skin pallid. He was at one time gangly but is now simply gaunt.

“And your first name, Mr. Brogan?”

“Peter, sir. After my father, who was from Yorkshire.”

“Scottish perhaps, originally?”

“No, sir. My mother re-married, you see. After we lost my father in the War.”

“Dear, dear. So you were bom in England?” 13

“That’s right, sir.”

Lightfoot peers down at Brogan’s documentation of employment at St. Joseph’s without taking it in hand, and wipes his runny nose with an antique cloth hankie that appears, in the lamp-lit entry, the color of a tobacco-stained beard. He decides he is happy to rent the room to this boy with a country accent and sprouting sideburns, but only if he pays three month’s rent in advance.

This initial meeting with Lightfoot will haunt Brogan:

It was as if my imagination became some rogue protectorate: by creating an existence separate from my own, I had conjured a buffed shield against bigotry. Don Quixote would have been proud.

Brogan had already been in Belfast for five years—completing his degree at Queens, one year into teaching at St. Joseph’s—and the clatter of the city had crowded out his memories of Ballylea. It was as if Belfast were one blaring newspaper headline after another, distracting him from the articles, the actual information, that lay beneath. At the time it may have been easy to betray his father, the tweedy farmer with an alacrity for horse trading that did not match his wiles. But a deeper animosity towards himself will arise when Brogan imagines his mother overhearing this conversation with Lightfoot. His mother, the tall, broad woman with a rough-cut stone face. Her severe smile. His mother, who racked his father across the ear with her rosary beads one Easter morning after spying his dusty shoes in the pew.

It will not be until decades later, long after his parents have passed on and he is remembering the story with Contreras, his good friend and fellow Nobel laureate, that Brogan will be able to muster a snort of mild mirth.

“Or, perhaps” Brogan will say, while visiting the Peruvian in his adopted home of Mexico City, “it is Lightfoot’s poem to write.”

“Forget the poetry, Paddy,” Contreras will say, “you have a talent for the fiction.”

It is early summer, 1962, on Adelaide Park, and the elderly Lightfoot and his even more elderly wife occupy the high-ceilinged rooms on the ground floor. They have converted the remaining two floors into five single-room flats with no kitchens and a 14 shared bath. It being summer, and the bedsits usually being rented to university students, all the other rooms are vacant save one, which is occupied by a burly Australian welder working in the shipyard and carrying on a torrid affair with a girl from the Shankill:

Awoken by shrieking passion,

the shrill canopy of lovelorn lust.

Brogan’s furnished room is a proper garret, located under one of two gables at the back of the house. After handing over the three month’s rent in cash, and after being relieved of his sole suitcase in one hand, his trusty notebook-bearing satchel in the other, and after Lightfoot sweeps closed the door with the grand gesture of a butler, Brogan lies down on the single mattress. He remains still long enough for the bed’s wheezing springs to fall silent. There are birds singing in the back garden:

Each shift of my body,

oak oars on a buckling

tin sea. Freedom birds

reach me:

be humble, stodge-man,

before lithesome Ariel.

With the summer off from teaching, Patrick Kavanagh, home as a metaphor, and the toothy grin of a girl from Derry all occupy his mind. And with an occupied mind, a man must walk. So walking is what Brogan did.

At first it is up the Malone Road to Shaw’s Bridge, where, if he has the energy, he meanders along the River Lagan on the tow path penned in by summer’s growth. The sounds are bright and sibilant, but the smells are deadened by the heavy air. Across the river, always on the far side of the stem Lagan, he sees green stalks twice his height. At their tops, flourishing, are round white flowers, as large and round as white sunflowers. 15

He is not surprised to learn, years later, that these stalks excrete oils toxic enough to induce retching if they somehow, through the pricking and preening humans conduct all the day long, reach an orifice:

Like Kavanagh’s whitethorn hedges:

Across the poisoned Rubicon,

Beyond Ballylea I go.

Innocence be damned!

Brogan is soon drawn exclusively to the heart of Belfast, where he wanders slowly, perhaps even languidly, if one can be languid with shuffle steps. He is especially drawn out when the rain is on, when he can get wet with what feels like impunity, a limp cigarette dangling drastically from his lips:

A James Dean

wannabe.

A shaggy-dog

suspect

only silence—

not cunning—

can see.

From time to time he gathers with other aspiring poets.

“Now there’s something,” says Dermot, after Brogan reads them a poem about a wood pigeon.

“I know,” says Allan, “who would’ve thunk it: a wood pigeon as a metaphor for sectarianism. Something so awkward it could fall off the branch like Humpty Dumpty.” 16

“Them birds are fat,” says Michael.

“As if they’re about to explode.”

“Aye, Dermot. Like Paddy here.”

“That’s right. Like Paddy here. Our congrats, Paidraig. When’re you due?”

“What’re you hoping for there, big lad? A wee girl or a wee boy?”

Brogan remains quiet. He takes a sip from his pint. He smirks and squints. His famous twinkle comes not from his eyes, which are tiny gray wads of damp paper, as colorless as the dull Irish sky. No, that twinkle comes from around the eyes, where his creases and wrinkles shimmer like raindrops radiating on a surface translucent.

It will not be until decades later, long after the appointment to Oxford and the mantelpiece is overflowing with hardware, that Brogan will be reminded of this moment. He will be on a train to Dublin with Dervla, that girl from Derry with the toothy grin, now his wife. On that train he will eavesdrop on a group of teenage boys. One of the lads has been chosen for the first rugby team at his school, and his mates are relentless in devising ways their friend will fail. It is only then that Brogan will recall the long lost wood pigeon poem, and he will flinch at the realization that his own mates, all those years ago, were only offering their highest praise.

Brogan’s stomach is indeed protruding for the first time in his life, and does in fact hang off his small, squat frame like a pregnancy. He is writing, producing material at an unprecedented rate, but has yet to close a poem to his satisfaction.

That summer Belfast went electric: electric guitars noodling from car windows, from house windows, from show bands at the Empire as the doors are flung open by a gaggle of cheer. Brogan’s seeing clings to large black sunglasses, lipstick on crooked smiles, lipstick on discarded white cigarettes still trundling out smoke. Belfast is sonorous day preachers in Commarket, the pasty sweat of a hangover. Walking through the city, he sees commerce compounded upon itself. The layers of filth and corrupted air pound down on each other so relentlessly they appear in motion. A rainy gale off the Irish Sea brings only fleeting relief.

Brogan feels lethargic, not fully functional amidst this compression. At twenty- three, he sweats under clouds that seethe. Besides Kavanagh, he is reading a biography of Chekhov, and is shamed by the doctor who fell into writing out of necessity. His own work halts when he most needs it to careen, as if the blood in his veins has paused in 17 distraction—or worse, despair. He is conscious his shoulders slump towards his rounded paunch, as if his entire body is being drawn down to the cement crud he plods upon.

Lying on his wheezing bed, he fingers the hair on the back of his hands and considers a poem about a troglodyte that unites the entire island: the so-called Free State to the south, cowering under the pall of the Catholic Church, his own northeastern comer, still ruled by Westminster, all united under a sober yet charismatic Caliban. But how can he, Brogan, from behind the curtain, not be associated with the one side he was bom into? How can this benevolent monster not be mocked as a revision of the dirty Irish, grunting beyond the Pale, ready to pounce like dark natives from the forbidden beyond? A wolf in sheep’s clothing, they will say, and not one couplet survives, if any were even committed to paper.

He considers Dublin. Not the city itself, for in the end there will be no Dublin poems. What he considers is a pilgrimage. Hennessey, the headmaster at St. Joseph’s, the kindly man who’s spurs first pricked Brogan’s ambition, has told him Kavanagh frequents a pub called McDaids, easy enough to find off Grafiton Street.

The terror of what he would say propels Brogan off his thin mattress, rumpled like waves on the sea now that it has been relieved of his body, and he proceeds to the small square table that sits beneath the one window of his four square walls. There he sits and considers a poem, a conversation with Kavanagh that bemoans the burden of his education—an education Kavanagh never had. Brogan is fluent in Latin and Irish by now. Kavanagh left school at thirteen, is said to have walked the fifty odd miles to Dublin from his home in Inniskeen. Brogan imagines Kavanagh’s snarky smile as he considers this rude spawn before him: this beatnik from Ballylea, this scholarship kid seeking contrition in a Dublin pub. The page remains blank. Again, not one couplet survives.

Or, perhaps, that blank page simply means Brogan has chanced upon Faulkner, and is merely bound by “the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.” For how many Sunday carveries could our young Brogan buy with the price of a train ticket to Dublin?

One of his favorite places becomes a bench facing Royal Avenue, his back to the dove gray grandeur that is Belfast City Hall. It is a monster of a building, looming behind him, its cold innards a shy, inanimate functionary.

One day he finds himself there, on his bench, after a rain. There is a hushed tone to the city. The sound it emits no longer rages for currency with the human ear. Brogan’s breaths are shallow, to fend off the smell of wet wool and the sharp cut of tobacco smoke 18 at his nostrils. Suddenly, it seems, the city is not composed of raucous and grating chatter, both human and machine. The air has gone soft.

He rises and circles around City Hall to Bedford Street, where he walks up the Dublin Road to Shaftesbury Square. Instead of taking his usual route up the Lisburn Road to Adelaide Park, he decides upon the more residential and posh Malone Road. His thoughts luxuriate in the soft air. His gait is swift but not hurried. For once his eyes do not feel obligated to latch onto every detail. Hands hanging from high coat pockets, his elbows jut out and sway with each stride.

Dusk is descending. So, too, is the mist when Brogan notices he has company. The company is sound and the sound is the clop-clop-clopping of a horse. He does not turn back, and soon the pony and trap are at his side. It is as if he is inside the cadence of the horse, and it is a world unto itself. The impression of residency in this world has him rising on the balls of his feet. Him, Brogan, and this horse: they are entwined, like the dancer and the dance Yeats wondered about.

The man in the trap wears the unkempt suit of a farmer, a duncer cap on his head. The thin wool brim has one crook dead center. His face is not stem but intent on where he is going as cars slow to pass. The lines in his face indicate age, but there is a vigor Brogan recognizes from watching his own father peer up from a squat in the fields, turning back to lead a horse to market, sternly coaxing a cow to feed with a flat slap at its haunch. Then all that exists is his father’s lumbering return down Drumwellan Road, a burlap sack of sundry goods flung over his shoulder, the dramatic flourish when he swings these spoils upon the kitchen table for Mother’s scrutiny.

Brogan stops at the comer of the Malone Road and Adelaide Park. He stops and watches the man ride away in a reprieve of traffic, and frowns at the cliche: the sea of modernity parting for this image of the past to disappear into the misty dusk. He lights a cigarette and is convinced, as the cars swoosh past now that the mist has accumulated on the road, that he prefers the sloppy galumph of a bell around a cow’s neck as it makes it way, heavy with milk, to the feeding trough. A horse is mesmerizing but predictable, like a well-told Mass, and perhaps too like a machine. A cow can be steady, too, but can also surprise, with gaps of silence and sudden shifts in the procession that become more sensuous with the listening. Later that night Brogan will fail, like he did in his conversation with Kavanagh, to capture this on paper. The blank page is as close as he will get to that grotesque, even drunken canter of a cow that shimmers in his abdomen as he watches the pony and trap disappear into the distance. 19

It is dark when he finishes his cigarette and begins to proceed down Adelaide Park, past the tall glowering homes of the affluent. He walks gingerly over slick leaves that appear jaundiced under the newborn streetlights. There may not be words for these leaves, he thinks, but there are words for what they will become.

Brogan now knows what he would ask Kavanagh. After buying him a pint in McDaids, he would ask him why he left. Why am I calling on a man in a Dublin pub who never left Mucker, his hometown in Inniskeen? Brogan reaches down to collect a handful of matted maple leaves. He squeezes out the moisture and grinds the muck between his fingers until all that remains is what will become the black earth that lies beneath not only Adelaide Park, but all the grand homes and spiked buildings that rose up when the hubris of industrialism got the better of this town. Why worry about being in the right place to write about home when you never left? Eh, Mr. Kavanagh?

Brogan will stay the three months paid for, then return to cheaper shared dwellings closer to the city centre. Perhaps Lightfoot was childless or passed away not long after, or did not take an interest in poetry: his version of events has never surfaced. Brogan himself offers scant clues.

I do know something of the area myself, as my wife spent her final days in a hospice a few blocks from Adelaide Park. During breaks from her bedside, I wandered those wide avenues, ridden with guilt that I did not have the resources to bring my wife, an American, home to die. I was reminded of all this just the other day, when Adelaide Park was closed for a bomb scare. It was on the radio, as part of the morning traffic report. Someone had reported a suspect device. 20

EMPATHY FOR THE UNKNOWN

One

My recollection is that the tide-fall of the Atlantic Ocean on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay is gentile. As a child, after I graduated from training wheels—what the Irish call “stabilizers,” a far more precise term—I would ride my bike to nearby docks to lure blue crab with raw chicken on a string. Or, if I was in a more adventurous mood, I would dive into the cloudy brown water, leaving a soft explosion of dull silver in my wake.

When I was nine years old, my father accepted a government post in a small university town in Oregon, and my family packed up our pale yellow Suburban and drove across the country. The year was 1979.

As we went from campground to motel, from Mount Rushmore to the Grand Tetons, my older brother taught me the lyrics to Joe Walsh’s “Life’s Been Good”:

I have a mansion forget the price

Ain't never been there they tell me it's nice

I live in hotels tear out the walls

I have accountants pay for it all

One of our longer stays was in Kewanee, Illinois, my father’s hometown. While we were there, my great-grandmother, Nellie Lippert, died. It is still said today that Nellie waited 21 to see my father one more time before passing on. She had raised him while my grandmother, a single mother, worked as a schoolteacher in a neighboring town. My father called his grandmother “Mom,” and referred to his own mother simply as “Mother.” I call my own mother “Mom,” so it was not until I was well into adulthood that I understood the distinction my father was making. I can only presume this hierarchy of intimacy was accepted if not openly acknowledged—perhaps it was even necessary— and can think of no better way to describe my father’s emotional landscape as it may appear to others.

What I remember clearly is waking before the other children and entering an unlit living room blurred by gray dawn. All the adults were sitting around a room with dark, ersatz wood panels. The pitiful light was no match for a large glass brick on one wall; an impractical design fad I now wish had more staying power, if only because every time I come across it a soft sensation explodes deep in my abdomen. Someone, I am not sure who, told me Nellie was dead. It was summer.

My father’s lap was cool compared to my own lingering bed-warmth, and with the introduction of Joe Walsh’s feckless rock star fantasy, my childhood now had a sheen of artifice; but I was still the youngest of the youngest generation in 1979.1 sat quietly on my father’s lap, unbowed by the power of silence, and exhaled a vague hope that I was still a pajama-clad totem for what endures.

Days earlier, before even arriving in Kewanee, our Suburban had pulled into a hospital parking lot in Galesburg, Illinois. By this time, I had finally memorized the first chorus to that Joe Walsh song:

They say I'm crazy but I have a good time

I'm just looking for clues at the scene of the crime

Life's been good to me so far

My father got out and walked across the parking lot in his faded denim cutoffs and white tee shirt. My mother told us he was visiting his old Boy Scout leader, who was very ill. “He was the father your father never had,” our mother told us. I looked out at the dusky sky and saw storm clouds brewing over the square concrete tower that was the hospital. Instead of opening the door, I crawled out the open window into the heavy air and 22 sprinted towards the imposing building. If I knew then what I know now, I would have smelled the imminent rain.

Slipping through the front doors behind a man pushing a wheelchair, I arrived upon a very busy place. Adults were standing around talking with their arms crossed; they were opening and closing doors, carrying papers and steel clipboards, and pushing trolleys with bodies entombed in white sheets. The light was shimmering but gray, as if everything was covered in the dull sheen of dishwater. I found my father standing in a hall talking to a woman in a white coat. He saw me approach, opened his hand over my shoulder, and pulled me against his leg. The woman’s wavy red hair glowed and fell to her shoulders. She had green aqueous eyes. It was like we were all in a comic strip and she was the only thing in color; but everything else, my father and I included, were black lines drawn on that dishwater background.

“There is not much else we can do at this point but keep him comfortable. Rest assured, that is what we will do.”

“Thank you, Dr. Rutherford,” my father said.

My father’s crow’s feet quivered at his temples, something I did not see the morning I awoke to learn his “Mom” had died. Nor did I see it when he turned silently to look at his children in the back seat of the car, before pushing open the door to go visit the only father he ever knew. I am perhaps burdened by my choice to watch my father as he watched Dr. Sarah Rutherford walk away down the hospital corridor, but if this burden is an acknowledgement of irretrievable loss, I carry it without regret.

Two

When I left for college, at the UC Santa Cruz, my mother gave me a terrycloth bathrobe she had sewn together herself. It was hooded and green. It fell to my ankles. The weight of it bordered on the impractical. My mother told me it was for the co-ed dorms, which still maintained a progressive yet lurid aura in 1988.

On my first day at Gauss House dorm, amidst the hubbub of family leave-taking and the jetsam of teenage possessions, someone’s grandmother approached me in a panic. “Where is the ladies’ room?” she pleaded. Her eyes were wide, beseeching. She came up no higher than my chest. Ah-ha, I thought. She’s seen a man go into the bathroom at the end of our hall. I directed her to the cafeteria, across the quad, where the bathrooms were gender-specific. Eighteen years old, Merlin’s robe already hanging in my dorm closet, I felt as worldly as the stars. 23

I shared a room with a computer whiz from Danville who was already fluent in the UNIX system. He is also the first person I knew to use what we would soon call email. I, on the other hand, was only interested in smoking pot and listening to Dirty Rotten Imbeciles or Bad Brains in the loudest manner possible - or finding other people to smoke pot with and listen to Dirty Rotten Imbeciles or Bad Brains in the loudest manner possible. My new roommate was not one of these people.

Our next door neighbors were two women, Michelle and Yael. Yael died in a car accident while home for the Thanksgiving break, and once we Gauss House residents had returned, we all gathered to ceremoniously plant a tree outside the dorm in her memory. Michelle chose to stay on in her room alone, or maybe I am only assuming they gave her the option of moving or having a new roommate. Grading was optional then at UC Santa Cruz, but the myth being bandied about at the time was that Michelle would receive straight A’s for the inconvenience of having her roommate die. Or maybe that’s only at Harvard?

One night, not long after the dorm gathered outside its whitewashed walls in the first week of December to toss loose dirt on the burlap-wrap of tangled roots of Yael’s tree of remembrance, I called upon Michelle seeking refuge. Yael’s bed, being University property, remained. Michelle had covered it with one of those striped Mexican blankets with long fringe and throw pillows that sparkled at the center of each paisley curl. I told her I was high as a kite. Michelle smiled and told me that one of the first things Yael told her was how her mother, after a spring cleaning, would perfume their house in San Anselmo with sheaves of marijuana.

This is what I remember about Yael: She had a gamine face and a broad smile with thin perfect teeth. Her fine black hair was cut short, with one long wave of bangs thrown across her forehead. She wore loose, earth-tone clothes that draped around her broad hips, a fashion I would eventually associate with Marin County and persists to this day. I myself had suffered severe acne all through high school, so Yael’s flushed caramel skin was a wonder to me.

Michelle asked me to sit and gestured towards Yael’s bed. I lowered my rump onto the single bed and my muscles tensed as the mattress gave way. It was as if I did not want to upset the serenity of the mirrored surface of still water. When Michelle came over to help me adjust the pillows behind my back, she was humming that Joe Walsh song, “Life’s Been Good.” I told her about my brother teaching it to me while driving across America. High and still nervous, the second chorus was all I could remember: 24

Lucky I'm sane after all I've been through

Everybody says, I'm cool [backing vocals: He's cool!]

I can't complain but sometimes I still do

Life's been good to me so far

Michelle said the laconic melody had been in her head all day. She had taken the Number One bus down the hill to Santa Cruz that afternoon, and thought she’d heard it in a store or a cafe. It had been driving her crazy, she said, because she recognized the song but couldn’t name it.

After I impudently coughed up Joe Walsh’s name and the song title “Life’s Been Good”, something was released in Michelle. She sighed deeply as she curled her legs underneath her. She sat across from me, on her own bed, and told me she had driven across the Golden Gate Bridge to see Yael’s mother in Marin County the day before the funeral - thinking this would be preferable to attending the funeral itself - and had proceeded to get stone cold drunk on vodka tonics with the woman who had just lost her only child.

Yael’s mother told Michelle she was not new to death. Her own father had been orphaned at the age of ten in Belfast, in the north of Ireland. His parents were scoffing pasties at a fish and chip shop at the top of the Antrim Road when they were gunned down by a rogue sniper on July 10,1921. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the sniper, a Catholic, was not aiming for the Rutherfords. His targets were two policemen, two Protestants, who were driving by in their caged Lancia.

Their son, James, was adopted by a wealthy Catholic couple who could not conceive. He was given a top-class education. After leaving Belfast to study at the London School of Economics, he honored his deceased parents by resuming the surname of Rutherford. While doing post-graduate work in Washington DC, he was scooped up by the Roosevelt Administration to implement the New Deal; and while traveling in Arkansas, to assess the progress of a writer’s project there, he met an anthropologist from Chicago named Winifred Lippert. Winnie had recently converted to Judaism, after family research revealed her ancestors were persecuted Jews who emigrated from Prussia in the 1850’s. Winnie married James and the couple moved to Berkeley, where James had received a position at the university. 25

Yael’s mother, Sarah, was bom in 1942. She met YaePs father, an unpublished poet from another wealthy Catholic family, this time from Boston, in a rundown Victorian on Harrison Street in San Francisco. It was a flophouse, where both of them were crashing in July of 1968. Her father died of a heart-attack at the age of forty-two, when Yael was twelve. He had received his inheritance by then, and while anguishing over his verses in his bespoke cottage studio at the far end of their overgrown backyard in San Anselmo, drank himself into an early grave. Her mother never worked, but volunteered for decades at the public library in San Rafael.

Sarah Rutherford told Michelle that Yael was named after a vision she had the night Yael was allegedly conceived. In the autumn of 1969, her parents were camping near what is now Joshua Tree National Monument. They were tripping on hallucinogenic mushrooms. Eyes wide open, Yael’s mother vividly imagined Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, entering their tent. In her vision, Sarah Rutherford kills the intruder by driving a tent stake into his temple with the top-heavy wooden mallet she inherited from her maternal grandfather, Red Lippert, a stonecutter from Kewanee, Illinois.

I shuddered and rose from a Yael’s bed to shake off a chill. Pacing in front of Michelle, I told her about the play I was reading in my political philosophy class. Set in a tenement during the Irish War of Independence in the early 1920’s, a young woman named Minnie is killed by the English because she is thought to be a member of the insurgent group called the Irish Republican Army. The real insurgent, however, a man named Maguire, had shown up earlier to drop off a backpack full of hand grenades. He had not told anyone what was in the backpack, nor that he was heading out to participate in an organized ambush of the British colonizers. He instead told his friends he was going out to catch butterflies. The ambush fails, Maguire is killed, and English boots are soon busting down doors in the tenement, where they find the innocent Minnie holding the backpack full of grenades and shoot her dead.

“The Maguire character was using butterflies to cover up the fact that he was going out to kill people,” I told Michelle. “He was covering it up from his own people, his friends. Butterflies, Michelle! Can you believe it?!”

“Have you been down to Natural Bridges yet?” she said.

“What?”

“Natural Bridges. It’s a beach down in Santa Cruz. The Monarch Butterflies are there. They come and gather there to winter, in the Eucalyptus grove. There are thousands of them. It really is something else.” 26

Three

I was twenty-seven when I wrote the following in my notebook:

The accidental detective is the trope of life. What drives the investigation reveals more than solving the crime.

At the time, in 1997,1 blamed this conceit on reading too much Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford. Looking back on it, I see it now as the crumbling artifice of my misplaced ambition as a writer.

If I had become an academic, this would have been my dissertation. I would have conjured mythology from pulp fiction, connected Odysseus to Sam Spade and revealed that Little Red Riding Hood was a tragic femme fatale. I was, instead, a bookkeeper at Asylum Plumbing in San Francisco.

Times were tight at Asylum Plumbing. After scrambling each Friday afternoon to collect accounts receivable from customers to meet payroll, the owner and I would drink ourselves into oblivion at a nearby bar serving obscure German beers. I was subletter in a flat above Lucca Deli on Valencia Street, along with a part-time dominatrix and a bartender with a full-time white drug habit.

One of Asylum Plumbing’s plumbers, or “technicians” as we called them, was an agreeable fellow from Alabama named BJ Olsen. I cannot remember how BJ ended up in San Francisco, but I do remember him singing “Life’s Been Good” in his southern drawl whenever he was harassed over the radio about not getting to a job on time. This was his favorite stanza:

They say I'm lazy but it takes all my time

Everybody says, Oh yeah [backing vocals: Oh yeah!]

I keep on going guess I'll never know why

Life's been good to me so far 27

BJ met an Irish girl called Anne in a bar. She pronounced her name like “lawn” without the L. After dating for a while, Anne took BJ home for a visit. We gave him a payroll advance to finance the trip. While in Belfast, Anne’s father was murdered. BJ didn’t understand the whole Catholic-Protestant conflict, he told us, but apparently his girlfriend’s father was associated with an Irish nationalist splinter group called the Real IRA. The Real IRA - or Real Irish Republican Army - was not happy with a recent peace agreement that the old IRA had signed with the British government. They believe it continued to aid and abet colonialism, and would allow Northern Ireland to remain under the yoke of the United Kingdom indefinitely. As a result, they still advocated violence to unite the entire island of Ireland under one flag.

Anne’s father was murdered because an American researching his Irish lineage had discovered that Anne’s grandmother, bom in January 1923, was the bastard offspring of an illicit affair between an Irish Republican Army Commandant and the wife of a captain in the Ulster Special Constabulary—commonly known as the “B Specials”—a volunteer police force comprised almost entirely of Protestants and sanctioned by the British Government. It was not this illegitimacy, nor Anne’s father’s cross-community lineage, that was the problem for the Real IRA. Anne’s newfound but long deceased grandmother, it was discovered by the American in some ancient court documents found in the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, had allegedly used her illicit affair with the B Special to inform the police of IRA activities. Loose tongues, it appeared, were believed to be hereditary in paramilitary circles.

BJ and his girlfriend returned to San Francisco and remained together. I left Asylum Plumbing in the summer of 1999 to head to Ireland myself. I was searching for my grandfather, although I was unaware of this at the time. Also, thanks to a stubborn ulcer, I accidentally discovered that the more I wrote the less I drank, and that my sentences became increasingly inebriated the longer I remained sober. This would not be the last time writing would save my life.

Anne was seven months pregnant by the time I left for Ireland. Last I heard, they were planning to name the boy Rutherford, his great-grandmother’s maiden name.

Rutherford Olsen. A bit grand, but it has a nice flow.

Yes? 28

Four

I was married in Belfast City Hall on October 5, 2005. Besides the County Registrar, my parents and my wife’s parents were the only people present. We then had a reception with family and friends in the upstairs bar of our favorite pub, the Duke of York. At the reception, my mother gave a speech and talked about the “circle being unbroken.” She was referring to the connection between my grandfather and me. My mother referred to her father as “an old IRA man.”

My wife’s work colleague, Gary, did not hear my mother’s speech. He had already left the party. Gary is an only child and named after his father, a Protestant policeman, who was killed at the age of 38 by an IRA bomb on April 3, 1985. Not long ago, my wife showed me pictures that Gary posted on Facebook. Gary is next to his wife, who is holding their infant daughter. They are standing beneath the Eiffel Tower, smiling, on holiday.

Des, my friend and downstairs neighbor at the time on Fiztroy Avenue, also had left before my mother’s speech. His father, a Catholic named Malachy, was shot dead at the age of 39 by the IRA on May 39,1977. Des was three years old. It was considered a case of mistaken identity. On June 15,2012, Des posted on Facebook that he was looking forward to his first Father’s Day with his first daughter, who had been bom the previous spring. My wife and I hugged each other tight as Des reminded all his friends that he had no memory of Father’s Day with his own father.

I gave my own speech that night upstairs in the Duke of York. I had nothing prepared, so I tried to remember to thank everyone who had come, those who had helped organize the food and music. If I could do it all over again, and knew what I know now and could smell the pregnant rain, I would have memorized and recited this from the clear-eyed sage Adrienne Rich:

Praise to life though the ones we knew and loved

loved it badly, too well, and not enough

Praise to life though it tightened like a knot

on the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved us 29

Praise to life giving room and reason

to ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable

Praise to them, how they loved it, when they could.

- “Tattered Kaddish,” 1991

Five

The American who discovered that illicit affair in Belfast between the IRA man and the wife of a B Special in the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, commonly known as PRONI, and to which we can attribute the existence of one Rutherford Olsen, returned stateside and settled in the town of his college alma mater, Santa Cruz, California. He had visited Ireland on what was to be a two-week vacation, and had no intention of investigating his Irish ancestry, but instead spent all his money and maxed out his credit cards to hunker down in a bedsit off the Lisburn Road for six months while making daily trips to Stockman’s Lane, where PRONI was then located.

Now in Santa Cruz, and his financial circumstances dire, he resorted to the job board up on campus, where he had once found work as a student, fifteen years before. It was August, the dog days of summer, and he helped several households clean their homes before vacating—receiving an hourly wage instead of a commission on any deposit redeemed—and one morning headed down to the westside of town to assist a woman who sounded elderly on the phone and told him she needed “things moved.” As it turned out, she did not need things moved around the house, as he’d anticipated, but needed them moved out of the house to the driveway for a garage sale she was having that afternoon.

The house itself was a single-level bungalow several blocks from the bike path that ran a serpentine route along West Cliff Drive and overlooked the churning Pacific Ocean. The woman gave her name as “K” and seemed perfectly capable of carrying the various knick-knacks and curiosities out onto the sun-baked tarmac of the short, flat driveway. When the man asked if she was moving, Mrs. K told him she didn’t live in the house. “Sister would never move,” she said. Sister was always working, according to 30

Mrs. K, and would never have time to move. Sister, she said, was in the middle of something and could not help with the garage sale.

After this litany, and a deep breath through her mouth, Mrs. K abruptly turned her attention to the man and became keenly interested in his exploits as an accidental detective in the north of Ireland. He told her about how tasty the bread was, especially toasted wheaten or potato bread smeared with butter. He told her how he had arrived with a burdensome drinking habit, but had moderated his intake, began to take daily walks through the city and along the towpath that followed the River Lagan. When he told Mrs. K he lost upwards to twenty-five pounds, she nodded her approval.

The man also told Mrs. K how he had discovered his grandfather had been jailed in 1923 for conspiracy to murder a woman named Sarah Rutherford. He told her about that day in PRONI when he found the court documents, which include a crumpled and incriminating letter found in his grandfather’s coat pocket with instructions to murder Mrs. Rutherford because, the letter alleged, she was providing the the police with the names and movements of the west Belfast IRA. He told Mrs. K all this while they pulled copper tea strainers out of wooden boxes and laid long necklaces with stone pendants on white sheets that glared back at them in the mid-morning sun.

“What would the wife of a policeman know about the IRA?” Mrs. K asked.

“Tell your men to do her in at once,” the man said out loud, quoting the hand­ written letter found in his grandfather’s coat. The letter had been tom down the middle, he said. “Don’t delay,” it said.

He was carrying an antique popcorn popper—the ones that look like the Little Dipper, with a wooden handle and a square metal-mesh cage where you pop the popcorn over an open fire—when Mrs. K stopped and sniffed the air. She turned to face a hallway leading to the dark recesses of the house and shouted: “He says he wants to be a writer!”

There was a faint ruffling in the shadows. A small, squat woman emerged. She had short curly brown hair. Her hooded eyes were fixed on the popcorn popper and its rusted cage. “It’s a butterfly catcher,” the young man said, and the small woman looked up at him. Her dark eyes had the opaque clarity of obsidian. He released the popcorn popper into her hands. “My grandfather didn’t kill her,” he said. “There was only one Sarah Rutherford with a recorded death between 1920 and 1930.1 found the death certificate. It was carcinoma of the breast that got her.” The small woman’s thin lips curled into a sly grin. She turned and walked back into the cool darkness of the carpeted hall, carrying the popcorn popper with both hands. 31

The young man looked at Mrs. K when he heard her sigh, and found her watching the shadowed space the tiny woman had disappeared into. Mrs. K’s eyes were moist, her frown beseeching, as if she was not sure whether to follow the woman or not, and the man felt a warmth somewhere behind his navel. It was a soft explosion that radiated out across his body. He recognized this sensation from a time and place he could not recall, as if it were empathy for the unknown. He wanted Mrs. K to follow this woman into the darkness, but only if she would return and tell him about all that was said and done.

“It’s okay,” Mrs. K finally said, “that’s just Sister. She’s writing something she keeps calling a tattered Kaddish. I don’t know who the Kaddish is for, Andrew, but why would anyone need a tattered one?” 32

LAVERY’S GIN PALACE, 1989

It’s Fran who sent me. My Fran, who looked like she swallowed a wasp when I asked if anything had ever happened with Danny. They’d backpacked across the continent, you see. Danny and Fran. Sharing rooms here and there and everything. So a fair question to ask before you head off to tell a man that, all being well, you’re first in line to marry his best mate since primary school.

But now that I’m sitting here, next to Danny, a full pint in front of me, there is no way to answer what is now the only question: Danny just needed to want something to happen, yeah? It was hanging out there like Christmas lights in July.

With his puffy, broad bake, you’d be forgiven for thinking Danny’s eyes might have a bit of that Irish twinkle on offer. But no twinkle. No, this boy has a way of eyeing me that makes me think Danny Fannon saves his best craic, his crooked smile and maybe even a twinkle or two, for those who kick with the same foot as him and everyone else from Andytown and West Belfast and all the rest of it. Let’s just say that, in my presence, Danny enunciates his H’s with a bit of gusto, like he’s a snake hissing out the word ‘hate.’ As if I didn’t already know I was a Prod from East Belfast. Fucking Fran.

“I got nicked once,” Danny is saying, “in London. Detained, as they say, under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. I was playing in a trad band, so I was, and carrying my pipes across Victoria Station. It was a Friday, around tea-time, because we had a regular session in Camden. Now these are your Uillean Pipes, you understand. Not your flipping bagpipes. And the Peelers wanted to know what was inside my case. This wasn’t too long after the Birmingham and Guildford bombings, so these boys were sweating like bastards in a whorehouse. But they stopped me, mate, because of the way I was talking. You folly me? Because of the way I said things.”

“How long were you in?” 33

“Forty-eight hours. To cover their arses for shutting down one of the busiest tube stations in London. Brought in the whole disposal unit, so they did. Fucking joke.”

“Because you were carrying a set of pipes?”

“Not exactly, mate. No. They pulled a wobbly because, well—-I started speaking Irish. Came out of nowhere, so it did. Just wrapped my arms around my case, holding it up to my chest like so, and started spouting out this story about how this man comes across this woman on a mountaintop. Could’ve been Finn McCool for all I know, but there’s a lake there, too, on this mountaintop, and the woman says she’s dropped her ring in the lake and can your man fish it out for her. Must’ve been one of those simple stories we read in school, to learn the grammar or whatnot. But here’s me, a man who couldn’t order a pint in Irish, and I’m spouting off in the middle of Victoria tube station. They’d cleared the place, so they did, and here’s me, hugging my pipes and telling this story to nobody but the air about me.”

“What happened?”

“Ach, I went quietly, so I did. Suppose there’s a file on me somewhere.”

“No, I mean—to your man. Did he do it?”

“Do what, mate?”

“Go for a swim?”

“So the story goes.”

“But what does he get out of it?”

“Honestly can’t remember, mate. She probably turns into a beautiful maiden or some shite like that. Fairy tales, eh?”

“There had to be something,” I say.

“Your woman probably threw the ring in the lake in the first place. How else does a ring end up at the bottom of a lake?”

Earlier, when Fran had seen me to the door, there had been a look of mischief on her face. Like this was as close to a proper caper as she was ever going to get, sending me off to Lavery’s to tell Danny Fannon not only that I’d popped the question, but that she’d said yes. 34

“Just tell him,” Fran had said, her face falling behind the closing door as if I’d been giving her the hard sell on some dodgy life insurance. “It’ll be grand,” she said, leaving me there on the front steps as if I didn’t live in the house at all. 35

IN THE CONSERVATORY

Belfast’s Botanic Gardens, late afternoon. Boy toddlers, new to the running game, plod after each other on the groomed grass. Their involuntary grunts are tapering vibratos. A young woman, sitting, her dress rumpled over her bare thighs. She’s planted her palms behind her to lean back and consider something other than her writhing toes.

Sauntering through this, Linda had asked. Must’ve been the movie they’d seen at the Queens Film Theatre. A date, if being home by seven can be called a date, and they spend it with a teacher who develops a fetish for fondling his thirteen year-old pupil’s hair. Only an art house flick would try to rub the creepiness out of that.

His first? He jokes about a fumbling encounter during A-Levels. After seven years, two kids, sure he can provide a name: Tracy, an exchange student from America. But the real story was how he plucked the condom from his father’s chest of drawers.

Linda had smiled. She did not laugh, like she is now, watching Shooting Stars in the other room. Him, he’s in the conservatory. Just him and the Irish dusk, elongated by summer. The moss on the side of the wood shed in the back garden has crept almost to the eaves.

Tracy? She was a technicality. That’s what he should have said. What if, before Tracy, it had been someone’s sister? Older? Even more technicalities that wither the remembering.

Wheat-blond hair, dissipated by hairspray? Charcoal roots?

There was, he is certain, a gold belt: a thin gold belt that does not sag between loops of her deep sea blue jeans. Those jeans, so popular in the Eighties—pressed as if new, pressed as if she could have been someone’s mother—they come up and over the 36 hips. Riding this arching tide is the gold belt. A thin coiled rope, really, with an invisible clasp.

His fingers are useless here. There is no need for his fingers now that the thin green film on the side of the garden shed blushes in a coy twinge of twilight. 37

OUR ELIZA

A bit of waste ground separated the row of derelict houses from the main road. Dad said the Council wanted to pretend they didn’t exist, but we walked by them every day. It was Bobby Reynolds, I think, who first began to unscrew the rusted steel plates that covered the windows. Aye, it was Bobby who found the one with the central heating still on the go-

Livable, so it was. And if we were honest with each other, which we weren’t, each and every one of us had imagined our own version of playing house in it.

Me? I fancied the front sitting room as my own. There was no telly of course, and our arses were sat on some cuts of rug we found in an upstairs bedroom, to keep off the chill from the cement floor. But I still couldn’t help but see myself kicked back on a cozy armchair or settee watching the football all by my lonesome, my sister Michelle not yakking on her mobile, Dad not wandering in to switch it over to the horse racing. It’s the simple things, they say, and whoever ‘they’ are is right.

We drank cheap lager. No surprise there. Sam Mason liked that rotgut Buckfast, but he was the only one. The rest of us drank tins. We did stock the place full of cider, just in case. White Lightening, I think it was, or some shite called Jack Frost. Plastic two litre bottles, lined up on the counter in plain view, to remind us of the girls we never invited.

He was a couple years older. Maybe twenty, twenty-one? Johnny Raygun, we called him. Someone said he was from Rathcoole, but how that someone knew we never asked. It was after I told him I was working as a porter in the Ulster Hospital that he started on about Mrs. Elizabeth Watkins.

“Aye, I used to be in that racket,” Johnny said, “for about ten minutes.” 38

The man laughed at his own jokes, and he laughed like my Aunt Ed, who was a two-pack-a-day-girl herself. Maybe this is why I say he was older. He wasn’t much to look at, Johnny. One of his front teeth had gone black, and Allan McAllister had it right when he said Johnny’s face resembled the belly of a fish.

We called him Johnny Raygun because one night he hauled in a box full of laser guns, which probably fell off the back of a lorry, and in no time we had them yanked out to defend against the aliens descending upon our estate.

“Looks like they’ll land over by your Nan’s place, Bobby! Check the back garden!”

“We have no idea what weapons they may have, gents, so we must be ready—”

“FOR A-NY-THING!” we all chanted, as if at a football match.

It was us against them, or whoever was up in the black sky. But the weird green creatures from another planet must have decided our laser guns were too fierce. Or they had better things to do on a Tuesday evening than take over our planet Earth. Doesn’t take long to see we’re our own worst enemy, does it? We can destroy ourselves just fine on our own, thank you very much. Look no further than our god forsaken country. Or province. Or whatever they’re calling it these days.

The aliens never came. Just like the girls never came. The whole caper lasted maybe twenty minutes, and Johnny did not partake. He sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, smiling at each outburst while wrangling a tin of lager. Think that’s when I really noticed that one black tooth of his. When I first saw it I didn’t want to believe it was that far gone, but now there was no denying it.

“It was only a wee temp job,” Johnny said, “at one of them agencies in the city centre. They asked what experience I had, and I told them I’d pushed a wheelbarrow across every building site in Belfast, if that was any good to them. I was in need of work, so I was. Me Ma was not good at the time. Not good at all.”

We exchanged glances, decent blokes all. Not a one of us asked what had been wrong with Johnny’s mother because not only had I eaten my tea in Bobby Reynold’s house more times than I’d wiped my arse, but I also knew where his five aunts and two uncles lived on the estate. If I saw Sam Mason’s cousin on the bus, I wouldn’t be able to tell you her name only because Sam had a gazillion cousins and I only knew her as Sam Mason’s cousin. But she was Sam Mason’s cousin all right. Johnny Raygun was not from our estate. He, therefore, was from somewhere else. Or maybe we were afraid Johnny’s 39

Ma was dead. We couldn’t have this fish-skinned stranger crying his lamps out on our patch.

“Anyway,” Johnny said, “they told me there was a care home up off the Antrim Road that needed some help. Lovely wee place, so it was. Right there in all them massive brick houses they have up in Cavehill. It paid buttons, but I was used to that.”

“You not sign on, Johnny?”

“Ach, you know. The dole is the dole, and work is work. There’s a caper behind that, too, but your man here talking about pushing trolleys at the Ulster Hospital got me thinking about that wee temp job.”

“What, Johnny,” Sam Mason said, “them wee old grannies give free blow jobs or something?”

“Mind your manners, son!”

We all went quiet. This could have been the only time Johnny Raygun pulled age as his rank. It surely was the only time he raised his voice. If it had been a regular thing, we would have kicked him to touch. We’d seen our fair share of nasty business, so we had. This was Northern Ireland, for fuck’s sake. We could smell trouble before we saw it. Johnny Raygun was not it.

“Go on, Johnny,” someone said, “Sam’s only slaggin’.”

Johnny threw back a mouthful of lager and swallowed like he was washing down a tennis ball. The man knew how to milk a silence.

“This was before you had to get clearance to work in a place like that. Now they do background checks and all that carry-on before you can work with the old folks, and especially the wee’uns. Too many whack-jobs out there. Don’t need to tell you boys that.”

“No you do not, John.”

“Well, when I first get to the place, I’m sat down with this Ms. Olivia. She was the Head Honcho, so she was. And she says to me, ‘Now, John, this place is no walk in the park. You will see some things that disgust you, and some that will break your heart.”

“And here’s me: ‘Got anything that will make my heart sing?”’

“Nice one, Johnny!” 40

“But this Ms. Olivia doesn’t even crack a smile, and says to me, ‘Just keep your head down and soldier on. Understood?”’

“Jesus, Johnny. Straight-in there, was she?”

“Aye, mate. This not five minutes after I walk through the door. Apparently the woman had been there for some thirty years.”

“So she was old, too?”

“Not like the other ones, no. They had me sweeping the front hall at first, and there was this poor critter sitting on a bench by the front drive. The rain came on and a nurse trotted out and put one of them poncho thingies on him. Just covered him up in a red poncho and left him there. I asked the wee girl at reception. She said he’s out there waiting every day.”

“Waiting for what, like?”

“The wee girl didn’t know. He had a travel case sitting beside him and everything. You know, one of them roily ones. Apparently there was a nephew in England, the only kin, but he never showed his face. The wee girl said the old boy wouldn’t shift, and would fight the staff off when they tried to get him out of the rain. But he never said who he was waiting on. Been doing it every day for years, she said, and at some point they just gave up, so they did. Took too many of them to carry your man back inside.”

“Just gave the old boy a poncho?”

“That’s right. A red poncho, to keep him dry while he waited. And there was this other one, so there was. I couldn’t stop watching him. They had this smoking section by a row of hedges at the very back of the back garden, and he’d be out there picking butts off the ground.”

“Scrounging for a wee smoke, the poor critter.”

“That’s what I thought at first, but never saw the boy light up.”

“Never?”

“Never. He’d pick one up, give it a good once over, then toss it aside, already straining his neck like a bird, looking for the next. Strange business, so it was. Ms. Olivia caught me watching him from the back window. She told me his name was McIntyre. Used to design aeroplanes out at Shorts, so he did. Not make, now, but design. Had a degree from Queen’s University and all.” 41

“Jesus, Johnny. Away with the fairies, so they were.”

“It was like he’d lost something,” Johnny said.

“His marbles, like.”

“Most of the residents just went about their business without a bother. Played cards and watched TV. Wandered down the halls having a wee chinwag or whatever.”

“Meals taken care of,” Sam Mason said, “a roof over your head. Not too shabby. Better than prison.”

“Aye,” someone chirped, “like you’d know, Sammy.”

“Seems like a decent racket, Johnny.”

“Suppose so. But I only worked there a day.”

“One day?”

“That’s right. They fired my arse.”

“Johnny Raygun survives one day working at an old folk’s home. Think I remember that headline in the Belfast Telegraph.”

“Wasn’t like I did anything wrong.”

“What then?”

“Well, I got through lunch okay, so I did. Passing out the trays in the room where they all gather for meals and whatnot.”

“A cafeteria?”

“Aye. I suppose that’s what it was. Each of them had a certain tray with certain food. It was a wee bit complicated at first. I would not want a job in that kitchen, so I wouldn’t. It’s like a life or death situation if someone gets the wrong tray.”

“Nobody died. Congratulations.”

“Well, as far as I know. But this is when I start thinking, Happy days, here’s a wee job where they feed me and don’t run me off my feet.”

“You enquire about a room there, Johnny Boy?” 42

“Thought about it, smart-arse. You would have, too. Anyway, it was coming near tea time, so it was. I’d spent the afternoon sweeping and taking bag after bag of waste out to the bins. But right when the kitchen was starting up its engines again, Ms. Olivia takes me aside and says, ‘Now, John, we need you to do a wee special message for one of the ladies. As usual, Mrs. Watkins isn’t feeling too well, and needs her tea brought up to her. She’s in room 402.’

“So I do as the Big Cheese says. I take the wee tray up. I knock. Barely can I hear your woman, this Mrs. Watkins, but think maybe I hear something like, ‘Come in.’ So I open the door. In I go.”

“Hang on, Johnny. This is too much.”

“Aye, Johnny. Riveting stuff. Let me just see if our Bobby’s shit his knickers over here.”

“But she’s still in bed,” Johnny says. “Just lying there. And there’s this white curtain around the bed. What’s the word for them thingies?”

“Whatthingies?”

“The curtain thingy that goes all the way around a bed. Like Snow White would have in a fairy tale or something.”

“Now, Johnny,” I said, “don’t think Snow White would have a curtain around her bed. Or a bed even. Wasn’t she holed up in a stone prison by her evil stepmother or some carry-on? Rapunzel’d be who you’re looking for. She’d be the one with the nice bed and some curtains, since she was the one playing the waiting game.”

“You know what it looked like?” Johnny said. “Mosquito netting. It was like this white stuff all the way around to keep out the midges. I could see through it, but not totally.”

“We get it, Johnny. It made things blurry. Get on with it, now.”

“As soon as the door clicks shut behind me, the old girl is at it. ‘Oh, Gantry,’ she says to me in the really high voice. ‘Oh, Gantry,’ she says, ‘you’ve come.’”

“Gantry?”

“Never heard tell of the man, boys. But there’s nobody else in the room, if you catch my drift. And she had this sing-song voice. Woman sounded like a bird, so she did. Her voice was so high and so posh she could’ve been English for all I know. And I’m 43 standing there, not sure I’m hearing right, trying to find a place to put her tray down. But there’s no room. She’s got a desk and all, and a small table, but everything’s stacked two- feet high with books.”

“Books?”

“Aye. Books. All paperbacks and hardbacks. The whole works. And from the looks of it they all looked like them romance novels. You know, the Mills & Boon kind of thing, with photies on the cover of some boyo with bulging muscles. Shirt off, of course. Some posh bird swooning in his arms. Her hair blowing every which way.”

“Windswept and interesting, as me Ma likes to say.”

“Aye, that’s it,” Johnny said. “Finally I just put the food tray down on the seat of a chair. I’m telling you, boys, these books were everywhere. Not just on the desk and table. They were on the floor, too. Stacked to my waist, so they were. There was a path from the bed to the door, but that was about it.”

“‘Gantry’ but, Johnny?”

“That’s right. That’s what she’s calling me. She’s right there, boys. A bit blurry behind the curtain thingy. Almost like a ghostie, but there’s a person there. There’s a woman’s body lying on top of the covers.

“And I must’ve mumbled out a ‘hello’ or something, because she’s straight in with this Gantry business again. ‘Oh, Gantry,’ she says, ‘these are such times of trouble. The streets are hardly safe, especially at this hour, with all the men pouring out of the shipyard. Yet you made your way to me, Gantry. You made your way to me! Tell me, love, did you take the tram? Tell me you didn’t take the tram. I hear all sorts of things they do to innocent people on the trams.’”

“Trams? What the hell? Didn’t they get rid of those like a hundred years ago?”

“So I says to her, ‘No, Mrs. Watkins, I did not take the tram.’

“‘Oh, thank the Lord,’ she says. ‘My cousin Bernice, the one who lives off the Malone Road, said they were shooting at her tram the other week. Everyone had to lie on the floor, cheeks pressed against that awful, filthy floor. Awful, Gantry. Just awful!’

“‘It is indeed, Mrs. Watkins,’ I say, and she raises her head off her pillow and looks my direction. 44

‘“Oh, Gantry. Darling. There’s no one else here. Why do you call me that when no one else is here? It’s so...so hateful to remind me of that man I married. God forgive me, but I’m glad he’s dead. Dead, Gantry!’

“So I tell her I’m sorry, and say, ‘What is it, madam, you would like me to call you today? Tell me. Your wish is my command.’”

“‘Madam.’ Well played, Johnny. Give this man an Oscar.”

“‘Oh, Gantry,’ she says to me. ‘Always the gentleman. Why have I done this to you? What is it that I, Elizabeth Watkins, have come to? Luring a good, decent man astray. Oh, Gantry!’

“At this point her head falls back into the pillow, like she’s had enough. Then I hear something. I see her shoulders start to shake.”

“What, Johnny?”

“She’s crying, boys. Just wee whimpers there behind the curtain, but she’s crying all right.”

“Jesus, Johnny. This is when you hightail it out of there. Yeah?”

“Thought about it, mate. Yes, I definitely remember considering that. But the sound of her stopped me. The sound of her crying. Just wee baby whimpers, like a wee baby puppy that has been left on its own.”

“Wee granny would break your heart, so she would.”

“Maybe I was thinking of me own ma, but I step up toward the curtain, so I do.”

“Oh shit, Johnny. Don’t be getting any ideas here.”

“I’ve seen my soaps now, boys. I’ve watched my fair share of Coronation Street, so I have. As much as anyone, surely. So I step forward, standing right outside that curtain, and here’s me:

“‘Eliza, dear. I am a faithful man. Faithful to my love for you. But there is a world out there. A big, bad, horrible world that is testing my faith.’

“‘Oh, Gantry, I know! I know! You are risking everything, Gantry Roberts. And for what? For me? There’s your position at the bank. Your respect across the city. Your, your, your...family, Gantry. What about your family?!’ 45

‘“Yes, dearest Eliza. I cannot forget about my family. They have done me no harm. How can I make them suffer? The children have brought me nothing but happiness.’

“‘Oh, the children!’ she shouts, and at this point, boys, she’s like a horse that’s panicking, so she is. What’s the sound a horse makes when it’s pulling a wobbly?”

“A ‘snort’?”

“It’s a ‘neigh’, mate.”

“A ‘whinnie’ is what you’d be looking for there, John.”

“‘The children!’ she’s shouting. That’s when the knock comes at the door.”

“Oh, shit. Here we go.”

“I know,” Johnny says. “But that’s also when I catch her eyes through the curtain. She looks up at me, boys, and our eyes lock. Not sure if they’re black or brown through the netting or whatnot, but she’s got these big dark eyes looking at me. And they’re glistening.”

“Glistening?” Sam Mason says.

“Of course they are, Sammy,” I say, “you ball-bag. She was crying, shit-for- brains?”

“‘Just a minute!’ our Eliza shouts. ‘I’m not dressed!’

“And her voice is strong now, boys. When she shouts out to whoever is knocking on the door, it’s not your soft sing-song voice anymore.”

“No more horsey stuff, John?”

“No more horsey stuff.

“‘Come,’ she says to me, whispering so just the two of us can hear. ‘Come here, darling,’ she says, and raises up her hand. I take a step forward, and stick my hand through a part in the curtain. And when she takes my hand, boys, it is soft. Here’s me expecting sandpaper, but instead I get the softest, lightest touch. She’s like tissue paper, so she is, closing in around my fingers. That’s exactly what she did: wrap her hand around my fingers. 46

“‘Darling,’ she says to me. ‘My sweet, darling Gantry. You are all I ever dreamed. We have come together for a reason. Maybe it is the times we live in, but we are being tested. Lord knows we are being tested. But you must go. You must go and be faithful to your life, to your family. Come back if you must. But only if you must. If you are unable, I will understand. And know this: if you do come back, I may not agree to see you. Not that I won’t want to see you—so desperately will I want to see you!—but I may not. My mind may be stronger than my heart. Do you understand, my love? You have been nothing but goodness to my heart, so the thought of having you all to myself leaves me...oh, Gantry!’ she cries, and her hand slips away as she rolls onto her side, turning away from me.

“‘Eliza,’ I say. ‘Dear, Eliza, I...’

“‘Go!’ she says. ‘You must go!’

“‘Eliza.’”

“‘Now!’”

“Jesus, Johnny.”

“And I go, boys. I do as our Eliza says. My hand is still hanging there, forgotten, inside the curtain. I have to bring my other hand in there to pull it out, as if it wasn’t even mine anymore.

“There’s a nurse outside, waiting. Her eyes like daggers. If looks could kill. I start down the hall while this nurse starts following and chittering in my ear. Can’t remember what she’s saying because I just keep walking. Just put my head down and keep on walking.”

“Jesus,” one of us said again.

“But hang on now,” I say. “How’d you get the sack? You did say you got the sack, right?”

“Well, I went down to the staff canteen for a cup of tea. Just needed to collect my nerves more than anything. I knew full well that the dinner would be in full swing, and it would be all hands on deck, but I just needed a wee bit of time. Know what I’m saying?”

“Loud and clear, Johnny Boy.”

“And I was having a cup of tea, thinking about sneaking in a wee fag if I’m honest. That’s when Ms. Olivia comes walking in.” 47

“Aw, bullocks. Here she comes. The Bosswoman herself.”

“I thought maybe she was just there to tell me to shift my arse and help out with the dinner. But instead she says, straight-away, ‘Now, John, we trusted you. We let you go up there on your own.’

“‘What was I to do, Ms. Olivia?’ I say. ‘Not say anything?’

“‘Well,’ she says, ‘that is exactly the point. You didn’t say anything.’

“‘To who?’

“‘To me.’

“‘To you?’

“‘That’s right, John. Claire went in there directly after you. She said Mrs. Watkins was not clothed. Naked as a baby, John.’

“‘Aye,’ I says to Ms. Olivia, ‘there’s no disputing that.’”

“Johnny! No!”

“That’s right, boys.”

“Johnny Raygun! I don’t believe it!”

“True as the day is long. The woman was starkers. Ms. Olivia starts telling me how I should’ve reported it immediately. That there are procedures for that sort of thing. ‘Why didn’t you report it, John?’ she keeps saying to me.

“And I looked up at her. She was not a big woman. Broad as she was tall. Not a mean looking woman either. Just serious. Yes, I suppose that’s it: she was a serious looking woman.

“‘Well,’ I says to this Ms. Olivia, ‘I’m not sure if that would’ve been the right thing to do. It certainly would not have been the gentlemanly thing to do.’

“Good man, John! What’d our Ms. Olivia have to say to that?”

“Well, boys, she didn’t have anything to say to that. She looked off to one side and took a deep sigh. Woman had bosoms from here to Dublin, so she did. They went up and down once before she told me she’d have to let me go.”

“That’s it?” 48

“That’s it, lads. No more to tell. Ms. Olivia walked away, and that was me. Didn’t even finish my cup of tea. Just walked out the door. Never even collected my wages.”

“Now, John,” I said. “Why not? A day’s work is a day’s work. You said so yourself.”

“Aye. I know that, surely. But when I phoned them up and told them to post me my check, they said I would have to call in and collect it in person. And I got to thinking on it, and imagined walking into that office downtown. Sitting myself down across a desk from one of them wee girls that always work in them places.”

“Give her a wee wink, Johnny. You know you have the gift.”

“But this wee girl would have gotten a sniff of what had happened with our Eliza. They had to file a report or something. The story would have gotten around the office.”

“Sure, Johnny. I’m following.”

“So, you know, I would be sitting there, and she’d be all keen because she was the lucky one to meet with me, and get it all straight from the horse’s mouth. Right?”

“Aye.”

“She’d be keen for the story only so she could share it with the others, who were probably sitting in some break room waiting to hear all about it. Right? They’d gotten a few details from Ms. Olivia or whoever, but now they could get the real juice from the man who was in the room.”

“This wee girl’d be like, ‘so, John, was she really naked?”’

“Aye. And she’d have some awful grin going. She wouldn’t be some cutie in her office suit and done-up hair.”

“What would she be?”

“She’d be some wee girl not after what happened. She’d be after what she wanted to happen. Couldn’t do that. Not now. Not ever. Not to our Eliza.” 49

PT-109

After hugs all around, there is a brief moment of calm silence, as if everyone is suspended between fear and hope of what might happen next. Then, smiling, Cormac’s father unzips his case and hands him the package.

“All the way from America!”

Cormac falls to his knees and lays one hand flat on the thin rectangular box. This acts as a brace as he uses his other hand to rip open a fold in the shiny silver wrapping. His mother, tongue lodged firmly under the fingernail of her pinkie, cannot take her eyes off the crumpled heap of discarded paper. Its underside is the color of dull metal.

“A PT-109?”

“It’s an American war boat,” his father says, crouching down. “A torpedo boat. Know who your man is there on the cover?”

Without his glasses, Cormac must bring the box closer to his face. He squints at the photo of a smiling, shirtless man wearing black sunglasses and what looks like an engineer’s cap.

“The man on Granny’s wall?”

“The very one. John F. Kennedy, Jr. He skippered a PT-109 boat in the Second World War. Maybe,” his father says, looking up at his wife, “we can build it together.”

“Build it?”

“It’s a model, Cormac. A toy model. You use cement glue to connect all the pieces. But it can get complicated.”

“We have to show Granny!” 50

Three days later, a Sunday, thirty miles south of Belfast. The traffic begins to slow. Cormac’s father sighs. His mother reaches over and lays a hand on his father’s knee. They have been silent for some time.

Cormac closes his eyes and levers his right foot to give the boat gas. He flicks several switches on his left. The torpedoes are now poised for launch. He blows air out his mouth to steady his nerves as his father rolls down the window.

“On our way to Castlewellan,” Cormac’s father says to the soldier, whose face now fills the window. “To visit my mother.”

The fire button is on Cormac’s right, at eye-level. He presses it with his thumb and curls his tongue against the roof of his mouth. His body convulses like a rag doll as the torpedoes make impact. Their distant explosions come in quick succession, and Cormac’s cheeks bellow as air erupts from the back of his throat.

The soldier, bom in Birmingham twenty years before, in 1958, watches the father tilt his head and try to frown. But the man’s expression contorts, stricken by an ashen pall. The boy in the back seat is still writhing, still imitating thunder. Next to the boy, in the empty back seat, the soldier sees a flat rectangular box still wrapped in cellophane. It has a color photo of a war boat on it, a black-and-white photo of JFK in the comer. Just below the American president’s face, tanned and smiling as if on holiday, the cellophane has been stretched. It is an oval mark. The uniform ripples in the plastic are like a silver thumbprint.

Fucking Americans, the soldier thinks.

When he stands upright, the butt of his rifle knocks against the car door once. In the blustery day, the sound is thin, like a sharp cluck of the tongue. The soldier watches the shallows of Dundrum Bay in the distance, where the water hangs in scalloped waves braced by the wind. He imagines the boy pawing at the box, dragging a fingernail to pull the cellophane as far as it will go without tearing.

“Hush, Cormac!” the mother says in a tight whisper.

“Resistance is futile!” the soldier hears. “Surrender is your only option!” 51

CLIMBING SLIEVE GULLION

The purple heather soaks the Ring of Gullion, surrounding a patchwork valley below. October 2009, and the helicopters are gone. So are the British military bases where they used to land, securing the top of each hill because they feared the ancient roads below.

The nobby hills—they call them mountains here—are still dotted with yellow gorse flower. Most resplendent in late spring and early summer, when it can shimmer in the subversive sun, this shrub hungers to break free, to creep across the green fields and devour countless generations of toil, hundreds of years of human sustenance extracted between the humped sinews of the hedgerow. With sheep, cattle, and the odd herd of goats their foot soldiers, backhoes and simple ground fires their crude technology, locals keep the gorse at bay. Now, as the shuddering flap of the helicopters fade towards memory, we can only hope this will remain the sole battle for South Armagh.

But the signpost below, at the trailhead, will tell you the Ring of Gullion is the hollow shell of a volcano: this valley has seen forces far more powerful than civilization’s geometry.

The Ring breaks only for a view of Dundalk Bay to the south. Beyond is the Irish Sea, as deceptively calm as the dull Irish sky. There is a wee party in my heart when I look to the southwest and identify, for the very first time, Patrick Kavanagh’s misty grey hills of Monaghan. The people’s poet, a farmer who wrote for the pub instead of the castle, Kavanagh fought the temptation to join the mandarins:

Ashamed of what I loved

I flung her from me and called her a ditch

Although she was smiling at me with violets. 52

Kavanagh continued to ponder the ditch, and poets since have heeded his call. The best I have done is sit beside his statue on the Grand Canal in Dublin:

O commemorate me with no hero-courageous

Tomb—just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.

To the north, towards Belfast, the clouds are lower. They appear to be trundling south, towards me, threatening to become biblical, like Big Ian Paisley’s bluster. That old protestant saw that the sun only shines on Ulster seems, once again, more a war cry than a truth. What difference will the sun make if the volcano still seethes below?

The best place to start is not at the trailhead. It is at the small house where the Ballard Road meets the Longfield Road. You are at the edge of what once was called the Valley of the Fews, where the great O’Neill clan, the patrons of poets, once ruled. Here educated men wrote verse that rhymed in Irish. It is here the likes of Art McCooey and Peader O Doirnm drank too much, were rivals in love, and lamented the loss of Ireland as the British spread its yoke beyond the Pale.

Yet here, too, where the Ballard Road begins, stands a white-washed house that never enjoyed patrons beyond the self. Only hard toil upon the unforgiving earth could feed its occupants and warm its hearth. Yes, here stands a house so small its two stories make it stand thin amidst thread-bare woods. A house old enough it warrants a small black dot on the ordinance survey map. Old enough, even, for my mother’s father to have been bom here.

Head up Ballard Road past this house, past the crumbling stone outbuildings to its rear, and up the hill where Peter Malone was found in an icy ditch one winter morning. A glutton for punishment, he tried to get up the hill more than once, but either the inclement weather or his inclement faculties after a night in Larkin’s pub got in the way, and Peter decided he was happy enough snoring away in the open air. So if you’re feeling a bit rough, or sick, or the vagaries of your personal finances have gotten the better of you, think of poor Peter in that ditch. For that i what you are. You are not fucked. You are “Peter Malone’d.” 53

Now: keep going up that hill, hopefully sober and wearing sensible enough shoes that the weather, either wet or becoming so, will not keep you back. Keep going until the trees thin and the rocks get larger and the hedges become unruly in their neglect. The road will level a bit, but keep going until the fields stretch out on your right with long brown grass. There you can find a gate to pass through. The most direct route is up a gravel path wide enough for a motorized vehicle, but any path across these fields will do. You will have to find a stile or two to get past a fence or two, but just like most roads in Ireland, there are many ways to get to the same place.

The hill will steepen, and the heather will appear again, like dried blood against grass so green it becomes rich with green—a wealthy, prosperous green to survive the driest summer. Depending on the time of year, a stream may even trickle bright clear water seeping from the soft ground underfoot. You are now above and beyond Lislea. The locals, in the township behind you, may wonder what you’re doing up here in the back of beyond. But you are now on your way. You are climbing Slieve Gullion.

You’ll know you have reached the top when you come upon a collection of stones. They’re not too large and not piled too high, but they are a conspicuous enough cairn. Some say Calliagh Berra, the blue hag, dropped these stones from her gaping pockets while hill-hopping to her namesake mountain in County Meath to the south. Lislea poet Hugh Murphy tells us Cuilange, hero of the great Irish epic Tain Bo Cuailnge, or the Cattle Raid of Cooley, is buried here.

Who knows? Who cares? Tell us what this place means to you and all will listen. But tell us slowly, let it unfold in your mind as you circle this northern cairn and the boggy summit of Slieve Gullion spreads out before you. This is what Hugh Murphy sees when he considers the hills that surround his home:

Its many indentations and crevassed passes lie like scars on its surface. Some of them, sunk deep into its summit, give it a masticated appearance, as though some giant from a distant past had feasted along its ridges, allowing the remnants to fall as boulders and broken ditches, which still lie un-swept on its slopes. 54

What will most likely capture your attention first, up ahead and to the right, is a small summit lake. This is Calliagh Berra’s Lough. It is known by no other name, so she must have been here.

We are told the great Finn McCool, thundering down from the north after building a stony bridge from Ireland to Scotland—the remains of which are now the popular tourist destination, the Giant’s Causeway—came across Calliagh Berra sitting beside her lake. She had lost her ring, down in the bottomless depths, and could he fetch it for her? The fair-haired giant with bursting muscles dove right in, of course, but emerged with grey hair and wrinkled skin. Finn was able to restore his youth, but his hair remained gray as he went on to even greater adventures. Locals warn never to touch the water, unless you care to age before your years. Was the towering Finn made wiser from the experience? Some say that when Calliagh Berra is loved, the old hag turns into a beautiful young woman. Was Finn’s sacrifice enough?

If the day is fine, and the sky is blue from an invisible sun, the lake will look barrel-brown. It will be still and strong against the encroaching heather. More likely, if the sky is grey, and the clouds are billowing above you, the steely surface will seethe with rigid ripples, like blades against the raging sky. The water, on any day, is opaque. The bottom is hidden. It is forbidden. Calliagh Berra’s lake is formidable not in size but in posture. Whether the stories are true or not, they are to be heeded. They are lessons left for us by those who came before. If the great Finn can be deceived, so can we all. If love turns the old young, then there is hope for the future.

If you are brave enough to approach the edge of Calliagh’s lake, you will find a large stone. It is noticeable at first only because its shape is a circle. Not a perfect circle, yet near enough to catch our attention. And yes, there is a hole in the middle. This curious stone, perhaps two feet wide, is not nature’s design. It is a quemstone, the bottom half of a grindstone, which was used to grind grain and other foodstuffs over three thousand years ago. Famous Seamus, the Nobel-winner, helps us picture them as “one-eyed and benign”, as:

A world-tree of balanced stones,

Querns piled like vertebrae,

The marrow crushed to grounds. 55

Those who came before, it would appear, spent enough time up here that they needed to grind the fruits of their labor from the valley below. They spent enough time up here to eat and survive and tell stories of this place so it may live in the minds of those who never come.

Head south to cross the chewed-up landscape, careful not to get your sensible shoes caught in the muck, or moistened by a grassy step that suddenly gives way to watery depths that rise above your hearty soles. Keep heading south and you will see the second cairn, the southern cairn. There will be a slight incline as you reach this next pile of stones dropped from Calliagh’s pockets. These are larger stones. There are more of them. At their top is the true summit. This is where the officials have determined the zenith of five hundred and seventy-three meters.

A hill to some, a mountain to others, Yeats ventured far enough from his castle to gaze upon Slieve Gullion and call it “mystical”. If the Belfast-born C.S. Lewis never came, he still must have dreamed of this place. Over there, on that large granite rock, flat and grey amidst the tufts of long grass, is where Aslan was crucified for the sins of Namia, later to rise from the dead. I am sure of it.

Stand on this, the southern cairn, and you have climbed Slieve Gullion. Stand on this cairn and on most days you will see nothing but grey mist swirling around you, the grey rocks at your feet like the earth’s bones laid bare. The light will seem luminous. The air will be fresh. Sleep is the last thing from your mind, which is a good thing, for you are standing on the roof of Calliagh Berra’s house!

To the southwest, down and away from the bronze plate embedded in the rock that marks the official summit, there is a passageway. There is no door, so go right in. Nobody has seen Calliagh Berra here for a very long time.

You will have to crouch to get through the front hallway, but you will soon come into a room where you can stand. You will come into a room where you can sit. You will come into a room where saints and sinners have sought refuge.

The room is quiet and the air is still. The rocks that surround you are large and flat and neatly fitted to provide warmth and safety from the glowing air outside.

Sit, breathe, be quiet.

Relax, release, be steady.

History is here. Time is here. What came before, what happens now, and what is sure to come will all gently converse here in Calliagh Berra’s house. 56

One time I came up here, alone, with a backpack full of sandwiches and water and bars of Boumeville chocolate. It was a fine summer’s day. The sky was grey and dull, but the views were vivid and clear. The hedgerows in the valley below seemed closer than ever before. Forty shades of green indeed.

I did not come across a soul until I entered Calliagh Berra’s house. There were two boys inside. No older than ten or twelve, they were laughing and chatting to themselves until they heard me coming, when they fell silent. Skinny boys, they were, with pale skin and freckles running up forearms that disappeared into rolled-up sleeves.

They gave me that silent Ulster greeting amongst men: one horizontal swivel of the head and an expression composed of one part grin, two parts frown. They told me they were from Ballard direction and this was their first time atop Slieve Gullion. They had been told about Calliagh Berra’s house by an uncle, who said if they entered her house a beautiful maiden would come and kiss them on the cheek. This maiden, the uncle had said, would whisper of lands far away to the west. The maiden would tell them that the days of the great poets are over. That time had forgotten this borderland between sorrow and freedom.

But the maiden had not come, they said. No golden locks of hair had tickled their cheeks. No visions of a promise land to the west had appeared. They headed on their way and bid me a “safe home”.

“But where is home?” I asked.

One of the boys, crouching to exit the front hallway, turned back with his hands on his knees.

“Where is home?” he asked. “Whose home, mate?”

“My home.”

“Why you asking me that?”

“Because I’m not sure.”

“Well, it idn’t here, mate,” he said with a grin, and his friend’s laugh echoed down the hallway. “And by the way, you didn’t touch that lake, did you?”

“What do you mean?” 57

“The lake, on the other side of the mountain. You been touching the water?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Maybe just a wee splash, on your face?”

“Yeah. How did you know?”

“Cause you’re going grey, mate. Right there on yer chin.”

He came back in and sat down across from me. His friend was nowhere to be seen.

“So it’s true then?” I said.

“You mean, you never noticed it before, them grey hairs?”

“No.”

“Well, they’re there, so they are. Sure as I’m sitting here.”

His grin was thin and his pale blue eyes twinkled with mischief. He no longer appeared to me as a child.

“Can I ask you a question?” I said.

“Aye.”

“Why haven’t you asked me where I’m from?”

“I don’t folly, mate.”

“Every time I open my mouth in Ireland, somebody asks me where I’m from.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I guess because of my accent.”

“You do talk funny, mate. I’ll give you that.”

“So you noticed.”

“Oh, aye. Listen, I best be going. But about your question, about home.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, we have a wee saying about that.” 58

“You do?”

“Aye. We say, ‘Home is where the road takes you. Whether it’s over Sturgan Brae, or all the way to Amerikay.’ Will that work for ye?”

“Sounds like days of the poets are far from over.”

“Not a bother, mate. Safe journey, wherever that may be.”

We stood and shook hands like men. Then he leaned forward as he disappeared down the hallway of Calliagh Berra’s house.

I could hear the boys shouting and shuffling across the cairn above me. Then the clapping rocks faded softly away. It became calm and silent. I breathed deep. I smelled the gasping rocks around me. Now, like Kavanagh:

I knew that love’s doorway to life

Is the same doorway everywhere.