Rainsongs Page 17

  She stops, as if aware of the sound of her own voice.

  Oh dear! I sound like a teacher! I made a few notes in pencil on the text as I was reading them. Just a few suggestions. I hope that’s alight. Things that you might want to consider cutting or making more emphatic. As I said, I’m no expert but it might help a little to have another point of view. But I’m impressed. I enjoyed reading them very much.

  He can hear water pouring from the gutters down the side of the cottage, running along the track into the ditches and streams that cross the fields to make their way down to the beach and the sea. A halo of light from the candles bleeds through the window into the dark night. Somewhere a door is banging. And for a moment the world seems to consist of little more than this room, the endless rain, a glass of wine and a woman he barely knows talking about his poems.

  His feet are propped on the small coffee table in front of him and he’s still wearing his big boots. He should respond but isn’t quite sure what to say. He leans forwards.

  Can I ask you something?

  Yes, she says, taking another sip of wine, her shoulders slumped in her big sweater.

  Do you think you understand my poems better because you’ve experienced loss first hand? You lost your son didn’t you, before Brendan?

  She gets up. And with her back towards him looks out of the window into the teeming night. Her damp, sandy-coloured hair hangs around her shoulders and he can hear her suck in her breath, as though inhaling all the air in the room, then sigh.

  He shouldn’t have been so direct. He’s upset her but he’s curious.

  Yes, she says. I did. It seems that most people know most things round here. It was nearly twenty years ago and I’ve not been back here since. I probably wouldn’t have come if Brendan hadn’t died and I needed to sort out his things. But to answer your question, she says turning round and looking at him directly, I don’t know if that makes me appreciate your poems more or not.

  I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s none of my business. It was impertinent. Would you like me to leave?

  No, she says quietly. Actually I’d rather like it if you stayed, if you don’t mind. I rarely talk about Bruno but he’s been with me all the time I’ve been here. I hadn’t expected it. Though I suppose I should. I was just so caught up with Brendan’s unexpected death and sorting out his affairs that it didn’t occur to me.

  He doesn’t reply and she seems to takes this as an invitation to continue.

  Bruno was ten when he died. He was just a normal little boy but for me he was special. I suppose all mothers feel that. But being an only child I think he had an old head on young shoulders. He liked to ask questions, big questions about space and the stars, about infinity and what happened before the Big Bang. He had no religious upbringing but had deep thoughts for a child. He wanted to understand why people die, what happens to them afterwards, and why there are wars. It wasn’t always easy to know how to answer him. And he was fascinated by history. When he was here he badly wanted to go out to the Skelligs. The idea that people once lived on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic fascinated him. I promised to take him. But we never made it. The day after we got home that last summer we were here, he went to Cub Scout camp on Exmoor. There was an accident.

  After that I couldn’t clear out his room for ages. I used to go in there and sit for hours among the dinosaur posters, and the globe on his desk that lit up inside. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t just going to walk through the door, throw down his jacket and backpack and go to raid the fridge. I continued carrying the touch and smell of him inside me, almost as I’d done before he was born and I was pregnant. I just sat on his bed and looked up at the stars through the skylight. You can’t always see them because of the light pollution in London but somehow it made it more special when it was clear and I could. I liked their unknowability, their otherness. It was as if looking at the Milky Way, with its thousands of dots of light, that I could somehow believe Bruno had become part of a web of being—the biosphere if you like—that matrix in which we’re all embedded. I’m not conventionally religious but it was a comfort to realise all matter is made up of protons, neutrons and electrons. I could believe that he still exists, that he hasn’t been completely obliterated that, if you like, he’s simply changed form and his soul carries on. Perhaps that’s as close to the idea of immortality as any modern person can sanely come.

  I’m sorry, she says, as if she’s forgotten he’s sitting here. I’m not sure why I’m telling you all this. It’s certainly not what you came to hear. So yes, thinking about it, maybe it does help me to understand your poems better.

  8

  Colm can’t sleep but lays propped up in his childhood bed in his mother’s house. He’s wearing his blue woollen hat for warmth as he goes through the manuscript and the notes Martha’s made in her round italic hand:

  When your poetry’s at its best, something of your spirit infiltrates this wild place. It’s as if the landscape is capable of remembering. When you describe the bleak moorland, the cliffs and bogs, you don’t, like Yeats, appear to be creating symbols but more like Hopkins to be revealing the essence of things. And that essence—or so it seems to me—is the intrinsic individuality and innate loneliness of all animate and inanimate things. There’s something savage about your poems. For me that’s when they’re strongest, when they’re most honest. The times they seem to falter are when they become more polemic and move away from a sense of place.

  The act of looking and waiting corresponds with what is, in the widest sense of the word, beautiful and, even though it’s a difficult word to use in contemporary culture, spiritual. It’s as if, as long as we go on yearning, the beautiful can’t appear. You capture that paradox. That’s why, I think, in so much current artistic expression there’s a contradiction; an absence, as well as a bitter nostalgia.

  Many of your lines have come back to me over the last few days as I’ve been out walking, trying to find a sense of bearing in more ways than one. I was particularly affected by the stanzas:

  how love must be a surrender,

  a letting go of that dark grieving

  lodged in marrow bone,

  and how life is only this moment

  at midnight: a guttering candle

  and a terrible wind

  howling across a strait of wide water

  like something lost in the anthracite dark,

  beating its way home in the battering rain.

  Through your poems I’ve come to understand a little more about the lives of those who live here and the structures that make up Irish society. Structures that are being eroded in this new welter of prosperity. I found reading them a haunting experience and have no doubt that, with a bit of editing, you should send them out for publication.

  Thank you for the privilege of letting me see them. I hope my comments are of some little help to you.

  Yours,

  Martha.

  Tuesday

  1

  Outside it’s still dark. That moment of stillness just before the sky whitens. The only sound is the small clock’s tick. Colm folds his arms behind his head and stares at the ceiling. This is his boyhood room. His football trophies and comics are packed in plastic boxes at the back of the cupboard. But it’s still recognisably the room where he discovered the secrets of puberty and poetry. Where he studied for his exams and read the tatty copy of Hustler that was being passed round his class. He goes over the notes from Martha again. He’s touched. She’s taken trouble and understood exactly what he’s trying to do. Even her criticisms are spot on and sensitive. It’s not really what he expected from this English woman. She is deeper than he thought and seems to have a feel for this place. He’s not quite sure why she spent so much time on his poems. Perhaps reading them helped take her mind off Brendan and her boy. He tries to imagine what it must have been like for her to lose her only
son. He realises he knows next to nothing about her except that she’s Brendan’s widow and a teacher. He’s strangely attracted to her but can’t quite make her out. There’s something fragile, yet feisty about her. Like a strong current beneath an apparently calm river. Sometimes she seems very much younger than she must actually be. He hopes his bluntness last night didn’t upset her.

  He gets out of bed, pulls on his jeans that are standing stiffly inside his boots where he climbed out of them the night before, puts a couple of slices of bread in the toaster, brews a quick mug of tea, then takes his anorak from the back of the kitchen door. His ma is already out with the cows, giving him a break.

  A mist is coming in off the sea as he heads up towards the Napoleonic tower on the headland, squelching through bog and bracken, careful to place his feet on firm ground. It’s steep. He can feel the hill in his thighs, his breath catching in his chest, as he pushes on against the wind. Clouds of surf scoters overwintering in Ballinskelligs Bay, far from the chill of the Canadian Arctic, fill the sky with their immigrant cries, casting dark shadows over the sea. As they squawk overhead he imagines the path of their long flight. Their tiny hearts beating beneath windblown feathers as they follow the compulsion written in their DNA, to head for home.

  Walking helps clear his head. Maybe it’s time to take himself seriously. He doesn’t want to be just another young writer milking his Celtic roots. Sure he feels loyalty to his family and tribe. But as one of his profs at university had wryly put it, it’s all too easy for the Irish to be quaint. Harsh and raw. That’s how Martha described his poems. That’s what he wants. He’s only interested in the truth. He’s read all about formalism. Knows that technique is important. But for him it’s simply a means to an end and not the end in itself. He wants his writing to affect his readers like a wound. A beautiful wound.

  He climbs on through the wind and sleet towards the tower, though there’s too much mist for him to see the Skelligs. Ahead the sky and ocean merge in a grey veil that stretches away towards America. How he loves this place. The savagery, the untamed wildness. Here on the edge of the land, the edge of Europe. He can feel it in his bones, the threads and connections running back through the centuries. It pushes him up against his own limits. It was during the last Ice Age that the corries, lakes, and valleys of the Iveragh Peninsular were created. The sandstone and siltstone washed down by rivers from the mountains to the north. Much of the mountain is still held in common. Though once it was shared by kinship groups who lived together in a clachán, the head dividing it between families for cultivation and grazing. But with its unclear boundaries, its absent shareholders and complex multi-ownership systems much of it has been abandoned. It’s as if the land has forgotten what it’s for.

  Not long ago these hill farms kept a mix of livestock. Cattle browsed the vegetation too rough for sheep and trampled the bracken under hoof to keep the swards low and sweet. Scottish Blackface sheep, Wicklow Cheviots, and Kerry cows. But now the number of dairy farms has declined, accelerated by the introduction of milk quotas in the ’80s. Small farms can’t provide adequate returns. At first the Common Agricultural Policy helped maintain farming in this remote region and, with it, the social structures. But reforms in Brussels are beginning to take their toll.

  Yet all around him people are enjoying the fruits of the so-called economic boom. New cars, holiday homes and house prices all indicate that many are doing very nicely, thank you. But while the craic is in full swing for some, others are finding it nearly impossible to survive. If there’s supposed to be a trickle-down effect, well, as far as he’s concerned, this new wealth isn’t trickling in their direction. There’s a hostility towards taxation. A wish for personal freedom at all costs. Brown envelopes have become the norm. Walk down the streets of any town in the Republic on a Saturday night and you can see the ugly side of modern Ireland. Flagrant wealth on the one hand, social deprivation on the other. The morning news is full of muggings and violence. There’s suspicion, too, of the new immigrants. Eastern Europeans, mostly. It seems his fellow countrymen only know how to be emigrants but are uncertain how to welcome strangers into their midst. Intolerance, indifference, injustice, forced emigration, homelessness. The Irish have suffered their share of oppression and injustice. He only wishes that it had given them a greater sense of common cause. A century after the Famine, Catholic Ireland showed about as much compassion as a block of stone towards those escaping Nazi Germany. And there’s little concern now for those who’ve been made stateless or are refugees.

  It strikes him as ironic in a country that makes a big deal of the family, that more and more he sees young parents out at gigs on long drinking binges, the kids left at home with a bottle of Coke and a couple of videos.

  Eccentricity, wit and humour. Those are this place’s great strengths. But beneath the craic there’s a sense of disenfranchisement among many of those he’s grown up with. Why bother to work long hours to maintain the family farm if the children don’t want it? If you can get a job in Spar or as a bank clerk or barman in Tralee? It depresses him. He’s the fifth generation of his family to work the land. Most of his contemporaries have given up. He’s a rarity. All the more so because he left, went to college and then came back. But it’s a struggle. He wants to write. Wants to make music. His father was out with the dog, hail, rain or snow. He loved his sheep. They offered two-to-three-year-old wethers and cull ewes for sale. The ewe lambs were kept for breeding. The wethers for wool. But with the collapse of wool prices things have changed. Some farmers still keep back ewe lambs as replacements but the wethers are sold off to butchers and meat factories. He’s thinking of giving up the flock. Just keeping a few cows. And the turf business. His mam cleans for Eugene. Then there are his gigs with Niall. They could get by. He’s not sure how much longer he can keep going. It’s too much pressure. His heart isn’t in it.

  Disease is always the main fear. He had witnessed the impact when he was nine. One dark afternoon in the dead of winter he went down to the yard with his father. There was a sheet of ice on the water trough and the slurry in the yard was frozen. It was unusual to get such a heavy frost. He can still remember the rime on the blades of grass and hedgerows, his plume of breath turning to crystals as it hit the cold air. One of the cows was having triplets. It was a big deal, a rarity. It had been a beautiful thing to watch those three calves coming into the world, knowing that back in the kitchen his mother was standing at the Aga baking scones, her apron dusted in flour.

  But later that night his father told him their cattle had contracted a disease and the following morning they were taken off to be slaughtered, including the three new calves. Some of the cows in the lorry were still calving, the new borns half-hanging between their hind legs. It distressed him to think of them being born in a slaughter lorry only to be destroyed a few hours later. He’d never seen his father so upset.

  But he’s tired of trying to snatch time to write, balanced on the single bed in this childhood room, of not being able to afford a place of his own because local property prices have soared, of feeling trapped and unable to move on. He’s torn between what he really wants to do and loyalty to his mother. The family way of life. Perhaps, he thinks wryly, we’re all in recovery from childhood.

  As he reaches the ridge he’s surprised to find a scattering of heifers wandering among the wet gorse and heather. No one brings cows this high up. Most of the upland is unsuitable for anything other than sheep. Cattle get their legs stuck in the furze and rocky crevices. What are they doing so high on the mountain? He’s not sure who they belong to. He manages to grab one and from its ear tag realises that they’re Paddy’s. He scans the glen to see if he is out with the dog, then retraces his steps back down to his cottage. There’s a ribbon of smoke coming from the chimney but no sign of Paddy, though his car is by the turf reek. So he can’t have gone into town. At the bottom of the track there’s a gap in the fence where the wire has been roughly cut and
the fence posts recently pulled out of the mud. He goes over to look. The ground is pitted with hoof-holes. This must be where the cows got out but who in their right mind would do something like that? Slowly he trudges back up the mountain in the rain, wondering how he’s going to gather up the herd on his own and get them safely back in the field.

  As he takes a short cut past the standing stones he can hear a cow lowing. It sounds agitated, though he can’t quite make out where the sound is coming from. Then, as he scrambles up over the escarpment, he sees her below in the ditch. She’s fallen and got stuck and, half buried under her left flank, lying face down in the mud, is Paddy. Out stone cold.

  2

  It takes the fire crew the whole afternoon to free the trapped animal. It’s too high to bring up a tractor and lifting equipment, so they use ropes and mud mats to haul the floundering beast in like a flailing whale. The whites of her eyes roll in fear as she kicks and bellows, frothing at the mouth. Colm stays with Paddy until the air-sea rescue helicopter can winch him up and fly him to Kerry General. He has a smashed nose, two black eyes and several broken ribs. The paramedics are also concerned about his neck and lock his head in a brace. Colm wants to go with him but they assure him that he’s in safe hands.