Rainsongs Read online

  As the match finishes, the television is turned off and a crowd gathers round the accordion player on a small stage. He’s joined by a big fellow with a ponytail on the uilleann pipes. These are not so much held as worn. Balanced against a leather strap on the piper’s thigh as he squeezes the air from the bag tucked under his elbow. A couple of whey-faced children in green tracksuits, who’ve been tucking into bowls of chips, get up and dance. Arms pinned to their sides, their feet flick and kick beneath their stiff little bodies. The adults clap approvingly.

  As Martha is watching, the door bursts open and in come Colm and Niall, accompanied by the girl with spiky red hair, carrying their instruments. They’re bundled up in hats and scarves against the damp. Martha hasn’t seen Colm for a while. It was just chance that she noticed the poster in the post office advertising their gig when she was sending back some of Brendan’s more valuable books to London, worried that they’d deteriorate in the damp. Then, struggling with her own company she decided, on a whim, to drive over to Portmagee.

  The girl with spiky hair is wearing jeans and a short crochet top. She and Colm josh and joke as they get ready for their set. Martha wonders how long they’ve been together. Colm is handsome in a scruffy sort of way. He must have lots of girlfriends. Over the last few days she’s been reading his poems and some of his images have come back to her when she’s been out walking. There’s a muscularity to his writing. A world-weary cynicism balanced by a tender humanity. When the fellow on the pipes finishes Colm climbs onto the stage, still in his blue woollen hat, settles himself on the stool and starts to sing. A hush falls over the bar. Again there’s that frailty, tempered by toughness, she first heard on New Year’s Eve. As he is taking the applause she picks up her things intending to slip quietly away. But just as she’s putting on her jacket he calls her over.

  Hey Martha. That’s grand you’re here. I was wondering if you found the package I left on your doorstep. I haven’t been up to your place to check. Don’t want to be seen pestering the critics, he jokes. And this, he says, putting his arm round the girl with spiky hair, is Kathleen. My greatest fan! She’s left the sick and ailing of Dublin for the holidays to come and play with her big brother. Now, won’t you join us? What can I get you to drink?

  7

  The last clods are glowing in the grate. The clock above the glass-fronted dresser containing his mother’s rose-pattern china, her statue of the Virgin and the school photographs of his nephews and nieces, ticks into the silence of his kitchen. Paddy O’Connell makes a pot of tea and settles himself at the table. He finds the Basildon Bond pad of blue-lined writing paper, his glasses and a decent pen, then arranges them neatly on the flowered oilskin. He takes his time. He is not one for writing. He removes the letter, with its printed letterhead, from the long white envelope and reads it again. Then unscrews the lid of his pen and writes to Eugene Riordan to tell him that his house is not for sale. When he’s finished he reads what he has written, folds it carefully, puts it in an envelope, licks the flap and props it on the dresser. In the morning he’ll go down the mountain to the post office and get a stamp from Maggie O’Shea. He empties the brown teapot into the compost bucket under the sink, washes his mug and leaves it in the wooden rack on the draining board, then banks up the fire, turns out the light and makes his way up the steep flight of stairs to his narrow bed.

  Monday

  1

  Dawn the colour of rain.

  It’s twelve weeks since Brendan died. For more than thirty years she shared her bed with him, comfortable with his thickening girth, she with the crows’ feet beginning to appear at the corners of her eyes. She realises she can’t be sure he never brought Sophie here, that they hadn’t made love in the bed she’s sleeping in now. She’ll never know. Looking back there’s so much they didn’t talk about, so much that she didn’t ask him. She wishes that she’d known him better, her husband. That they’d been able to support each other’s grief. She misses him. His stolid balance, his reassuring bulk in her bed and wonders if her fingers will ever smell of sex again. She is fifty-six. Nearly old. Maybe on a good day she doesn’t look it but if she pinches the skin on the back of her hand it no longer springs back like firm elastic. She has pains in her shoulder and, despite the yoga, sciatica in her right leg. Recently she broke a tooth and had to spend a fortune having it capped. There is, she thinks, nothing dignified about getting older. How does it happen? It’s easy to believe that ageing is what happens to other people. Being young is what she’s used to and then, suddenly, without warning, it all changed. She woke up one morning and there was more life behind her than ahead. She has lost her child and her husband. She’s forgotten who she is and what her life is for. Sometimes her recollections are clear and vivid but other days she can barely remember anything that’s happened and her existence seems full of dead purpose and thwarted desires. A sense of anguish about the hours and minutes she can’t recall washes over her. She thinks of that poem about the road not taken and wonders how else she might have lived, what other decisions she might have made. For the last twenty years her days have been full of ‘what ifs’. What if the sea had been too choppy and the boat from Rosslare delayed after their holiday? What if they’d stayed another week? If she had packed Bruno better and different clothes, made him a chocolate instead of a carrot cake? Or the weather on Exmoor had been bad so that they’d been unable to go canoeing at all? What if they’d gone out to the Skelligs before they left as she’d promised? Would that, in some way, have safeguarded him? Would any of these things have changed the alignment of the stars, tilted the earth in a different configuration? She was his mother. Surely she must have been able to do something to protect him?

  She’s been over and over it with her grief counsellor. It was normal for those left behind to blame themselves. But, he told her patiently, pushing his half-moon glasses up on the top of his balding head and looking at her directly: we are not that powerful. We can’t change the orbit of the planets. Events are random. A chain of actions set off by a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazonian rain forest. Not something we can control. Not something for which in some mysterious or magical way she’s responsible or that she should spend the rest of her life punishing herself for.

  2

  The touch of skin on skin? Could she ever make herself vulnerable again, undress in front of someone new, let them see her stretch marks, her less than youthful thighs? Brendan knew her when she was young. At her best. They’d grown older together. He’d watched her body change over the years, with the birth of their child and the onset of middle age, as she had his. After the affair with Sophie it was a long time before they were intimate again. Then in Rome, in that big mahogany bed, he’d leant over and kissed her with a tenderness that always made her open up to him. For a mad moment she wonders if she might have made a silly mistake and left him in London and that, even now, he’s on his way to the ferry to join her at the cottage. All his things are here. Maybe she’s throwing everything out only for him to turn up and be furious with her for tampering.

  She wishes that they’d had another child. But Brendan had made it clear that although he loved Bruno, he didn’t want any more. For a while she’d tried to persuade him, cajole him with arguments about playmates and someone to share the burden when they got old. But he was happy with their little trinity. For him the balance was right. There was just enough time left over from his books and running the gallery to spend with her and take an interest in what Bruno was reading or go with him to the British Museum to see the Egyptian mummies. She wonders if she’d had a daughter, if it would have been a comfort. Someone to share the loss of Brendan and Bruno. Her two Bs.

  3

  It’s market day in Caherciveen or some sort of fair. All along the library railings horses are tied up with bits of rope and blue twine, stamping their big feathered feet. Their tails and manes mangled and their coats caked in mud. There are skewbalds and piebalds. A mare and her
foal with tiny hooves. Horse droppings steam on the pavements. There’s nowhere to park and makeshift stalls everywhere. One man sells reproduction antiques, another net curtains, pots and pans. There’s a goose in a pen with four ducks and some baby chicks. And a litter of yapping puppies in a cage. A chubby little girl in a pink frilled dress and muddy anorak is crying and carrying on because she’s been told that No, she can’t have one. And across the road the MegaBites van is doing a roaring trade in chicken nuggets and cups of strong brown tea. Men in flat caps and woolly hats stand around chatting. Their faces are ruddy, their shoes black and their trousers Dralon. Some have big Rolex watches and gold-sovereign rings. Others are unshaven and wear trousers that are too short, hitched up over large stomachs with wide leather belts. A few have cigarettes cupped in their hands and appear to be doing a deal over the bay in the horsebox. A Heath Robinson contraption cobbled together from sheets of corrugated metal attached to the back of a battered car. Further down the road a woman and her assorted children sit perched on kitchen stools in a trailer that’s being towed into town behind a rusty tractor.

  You’d think the Irish were put on this earth for others to feel sentimental about, wouldn’t you?

  Martha starts to find Colm standing behind her, smiling.

  We’re adept at turning other people’s dewy-eyed fantasies into myths. But be warned, he continues, anyone round here found wearing an Aran gansey or singing ‘Danny Boy’ is unlikely to be a native. May I enquire if you would do me the honour of a drink? I’ve a real throat on me.

  Goodness, Colm, I didn’t see you. Where did you spring from?

  Oh I’m just in town like everyone else for a bit of the craic.

  She’s not sure why he’s asked her for a drink but follows his blue woollen hat into the crowded bar. The place is packed, even though it’s only mid-morning. There are market traders, cattle merchants in Wellingtons and women in their best clothes fresh from the hairdressers. There’s hardly room to move.

  You grab that table over there, Martha, while I do battle at the bar. So how’ve you been doing then? I haven’t seen you for a bit, he says arriving back with two dark pints, which he sets down in front of her trying not to spill them in the crush. She hates Guinness.

  Did you read my manuscript?

  I did.

  Ah, that’s grand, and what, may I ask, did you think? No, don’t tell me now. Maybe I can pop by sometime and have a chat. It’s a bit noisy in here for a literary seminar. So what you think to all this, then? he asks, casting an eye round the crowded bar.

  It’s very colourful.

  It’s that alright. Even though we’re what Joyce called the ‘afterthought of Europe,’ he says, taking a slug of stout, ‘haunted by a history that’s dead but just won’t lie down’. That’s because we don’t really know who we are, Martha. We’ve told ourselves so many stories that we can’t see the wood for the proverbial trees. Believe me, quite a lot of what seems indigenous here is an invention. But you’re likely to be labelled a heretic if you say so. Irish stew, now, well that was concocted for Irish navvies working on the roads in Britain. Irish coffee was cooked up by a chef at Foynes airport in the early days of air travel to keep the pilots from freezing to death. And Dublin? Well, at the beginning of the last century it was a slum that would make even Calcutta seem cosy, rather than the chosen destination for Ryanair stag nights. And Dublin isn’t just St Stephen’s Green and a few nice Georgian houses, you know. Not that long ago the streets were full of barefoot children, toothless women, and priests with polished shoes who spoke of hell but cuddled up in the four poster with their housekeepers, before taking confession. Mean little shops sold everything from bacon to coal. You could buy just enough fuel for a single night’s firing. Tea and sugar were sold by the pinch and it was five Woodbine for tuppence. It wasn’t so long ago that the pawnbroker was as familiar as the priest. You could pawn your clothes on the Monday and redeem them on Saturday for Sunday Mass. Now pole dancers outnumber poets and we love it because it’s so modern. Forget Beckett or Synge. Riverdance and computer call centres are our best exports now. We’re not really a land of twinkly-eyed fiddlers but bent politicians, property developers, and financial cowboys. And it’s a feckin’ disaster, he says, pulling off his hat and taking another swig of his pint.

  Surely that’s a bit harsh.

  Not really, Martha. It’s just that people like to buy into the collective myth. Even in the ’50s, just after we became a newly-proclaimed republic, for most of those living in the south, Ireland stopped at Newry. Unity was something people paid lip service too, like the restoration of the Irish language. There’s always been this fantasy that Ireland was homogenous. We’ve been sold the story of a shared struggle by politicians and teachers. I’ve never much bought into the version of donkeys, boreens and harps, myself. I’ve always thought it a bit of an invention and it annoys me that we sell ourselves short to the world that way. School children are still sent here because it’s the Gaeltacht. That means we’re officially supposed to speak Irish. It’s not true, of course. Every one speaks English, except for kids in school who’re forced to learn it, some teachers and a few old people. But for me, what’s really important is the vitality of Irish-English. Its Celtic roots, its old rhythms bouncing off modern idioms. That’s the excitement of our language. It’s alive and continually growing. That’s why, for a small place, there are so many seriously good writers. We’ve constantly sought to retell who we are. And now? Now what matters? Well, we’re not sure. We’re caught between two worlds. Two ways of being and we don’t know which we want more. We think we can have both but don’t realise or want to see that one kills the other. We’re in danger of becoming a pastiche of ourselves. But the Technicolor version pays the bills. All those American tourists looking for their Irish roots in Connemara and Cork. But basically, he laughs, so Martha’s not sure whether or not he’s being serious, we’re just a load of feckin’ brawlers with a talent for words and music that other people look down on but would secretly like to be.

  But everyone’s so friendly, Colm. Compared to England the place has, oh I don’t know, so much more soul. People have time for each other.

  He snorts. Hey Martha, don’t you be seduced by that Hibernian-Disneyesque shite. ‘Nothingness’. Now that’s the real topic of Irish life and literature. Look at Ulysses. Bloom was grand at doing nothing. Drink, talk, humour, storytelling and sitting on the lav. All ways of escaping the oppressions of life in a small, stagnant colony going nowhere fast. That’s why we’re writers and drinkers. For us writing is a form of perpetual complaint. Brendan Behan once described himself as a drinker with a writing problem and you could certainly say that about quite a few I’ve known, he says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Until recently this was one of the most Catholic countries in the world. Spain, for instance, has always had a left-wing anti-clerical strain. But not here. The Church gave people a national identity all through the Troubles. Then it demanded its pound of flesh. Piety and tedium are the traditional themes of Irish culture. The soul-killing, mind-numbing monotony of everyday life and the monolithic grip of the clergy. Religious and political piety were staples. People would sell their own mothers for a pensionable job under the state. And the price? Silence and cynicism. But, hey, we’ve joined the European club and, by Jaysus, it’s like religion and the euro our gilded saviour. We’re all so modern now. In England you had the ’60s when we were still in the dark ages packing girls off to Liverpool for abortions, pretending they were going to look for a job. Have you heard of the Kerry babies case, Martha? If you want a microcosm of life in rural Ireland before the Celtic Tiger that gives you the lot. Lies, secrets, silence.

  Yes, I remember vaguely reading something about it years ago.

  Things had changed in Ireland by 1984, after the Second Vatican Council, he says taking a swig of his pint, but not that much. The case was about the clash of two cultures. An old re
pressive Ireland and the new secular one that was just beginning to emerge. You know the story, don’t you? How a baby was washed up on White Strand near Caherciveen with a broken neck and stab wounds. The Garda went into overdrive. Bigwigs came down from Dublin. Speculation was rife. They got the names of local girls who might have got rid of a baby, of romances that had broken up, of pregnant women back from England. They pulled in hippies and tinkers. Priests asked for information from the pulpit. A ten-year-old reported that next door was after having a baby. Someone else that her friend’s sister was getting the tablets from Dublin. Joanne Hayes came from a small farm. There was another sister, as well as two brothers. One was simple and talked of nothing but cows. The father was dead and the elderly mother struggling with the family’s acres, which were in pitiful decline. Joanne already had an illegitimate daughter with a married man and was rumoured to be pregnant again. But there didn’t ever seem to be a baby. God Martha, the investigation was mediaeval. Our own Salem witch hunt in 20th century Ireland. Under prolonged pressure from the Garda, Joanne finally admitted giving birth in a field, then panicking and burying the stillborn baby. But the guards, in their infinite wisdom, decided that she’d had sex not just with one man but with two; that she’d had twins and then killed them both, despite blood tests showing that it was impossible. And all the time the feckin’ priests, who were preaching against contraception, were enjoying their own hanky-panky. Michael Cleary had two children with his housekeeper. Bishop holier-than-thou-Casey, despite abandoning his partner and child, confessed his sins each morning before taking confession from his parishioners. It was the dog’s bollocks! Eventually an English forensics guy examined the baby’s remains. And do you know what he concluded? That it hadn’t been stabbed at all but probably pecked by gulls. Would you credit it? The whole thing was a ball of shite. The prejudice of the guards, the hypocrisy of Church and the judiciary. The Kerry babies case tells you everything you need to know about what rural Ireland was really like.