Authors: Colum McCann
Once or twice Mam came into my room and sat by the window while they were downstairs. She said nothing, just looked out the window, watched the pattern of weather outside. The thing that got her most was the cold, the more or less constant lack of sun, the way it would seep downward into her marrow. She often wore two or three jumpers over one another. In the morning, while she got the fire ready in the living room, she kept the tea kettle beside her, warming her hands over the steam, even wearing gloves while she cooked breakfast, teeth chattering. Still amazed by snow, in winter she would watch my snowmen dribble down to a carrot and eye-pebbles, hugging herself into a coat, stamping her feet on the ground, watching the clouds made from our breath. The whips of winds shook her to the core – she was a watcher of storms. Huge billows lashed in from the Atlantic, carrying spindrift, causing the river trees to kowtow to the ground, litter to animate itself. One storm was a peculiar blessing for her – a sandstorm from the Sahara, carrying dust, red dust, all the way from North Africa, depositing it on the land so that tiny particles covered the windshields of cars, the roofs of houses, gates, walls, boots, the leaves of flowers by the front door. She didn’t wash the windows for weeks, enthralled by the revisit of red dust to her life. She ran her finger along the window ledge and held it up for me to see, ‘Isn’t it nice,
m’ijo?
A red wind.’
O’Shaughnessy and my father began to take trips abroad, mostly Belgium and France, something to do with EEC beef deals. Pictures were taken of O’Shaughnessy at conventions, wearing his fat gaudy ties. They’d be gone for a fortnight at a time, and Mam would fall asleep in a wicker chair by my bedroom window, three blankets pulled around her.
And then one evening the old man arrived home from France with two cardboard boxes. It had been a particularly cold day, frost on the ground, all the windows of the house locked tight, robins frantic over bits of bread in the yard. O’Shaughnessy dropped my father off at the front of the house, blew my mother a kiss as she stood at the window in her jumpers. She turned away. The old man lumbered the boxes and his suitcase out on to the porch, shuffling his feet precisely over the ice. He sat there for a while, the boxes at his feet. Mam asked me to call him in for dinner – this time he said nothing about chips. He breezed his way into the house, threw off his coat, just a white shirt underneath, combed his hair across his pate, pasted it down with spittle, and put his suitcase down against the kitchen table. Mam was bent over some eggs with
salsa
sauce, rubbing her gloved hands together.
‘Two shakes of a lamb’s tail,’ my father said, and he stroked her tenderly on the side of the face.
She looked up, surprised. He went back outside and lifted the cardboard boxes from the porch. Despite the chill, two large ovals of sweat formed on his underarms. He laid the two boxes on the kitchen table and nodded up and down, turned and told me it was time for me to take my swim. ‘He will be frozen,’ said Mum. My father winked: ‘Nah, he’ll be fine, he’s a big man now.’ There was a strange look in the old man’s eye. I went upstairs and got the two sets of togs. At the front door I waited for him to come with me. I held the togs up, but he motioned me away with his hand, told me to go on my own. He took out a knife and began cutting the string from the cardboard boxes. I waited at the window.
‘This is a present for your Mam,’ he said, ‘you go on down and I’ll join ya later, take your coat, wrap up well when ya get out.’
We had often swum in the cold before, but always in the morning, the initial shock of climbing in disappearing, a feeling that another skin had developed over my body. I had become better at going against the current, didn’t have to hang on to the poplar roots any more. I swam for maybe ten minutes, let the water push me backwards, went to the pool at the side of the river and pulled a hollow reed, went underwater, breathed through it. It was a strange green world down there, immense and fascinating and slimy, until I was so far down in it that water poured through the reed and I let it go, and my breath left me at the same time, bubbles rising up, and I sank, felt like I was swimming blind, the pressure thumping my chest, pushing arms outwards. I sat on some riverbottom stones until the pain became almost peaceful, a barrage of it in my lungs, and I shunted myself up, resurfaced.
The meat factory had only just been set up and none of the offal floated in the water yet, although I had begun to notice a little bit of a smell. I paddled around the river for a while, saluted a duck, got out and pulled my anorak around me – the zip was broken – put a towel around my neck. When I came back up from the riverbank Mam was at her wall in her big coat and three sweaters, and the old man was nowhere to be seen. I walked up and stood beside her, my hair dripping wet, a chatter in my teeth, wanting to tell her about my swim, but she told me to go into the house and towel myself off. She was looking down at a place where her wall had given through, one of the teeth fallen from the grey gum of it. She looked at it long and hard, knelt down, picked up a field rock, tried to wedge it back in, tried very hard but couldn’t, broke a fingernail, said something in Spanish I didn’t understand. It sounded as if there was custard in her mouth. I thought she was just cold. Her body began to tremble, quietly at first. ‘I thought it would support,’ she said to herself, ‘it’s so easy thing to do.’ She tried to wedge another rock in, but it jutted out and her fingers shook. She pushed her knee against the rock, but it still didn’t budge. She stood up, shivering.
‘I always thought it will be better than this,
m’ijo,
’ she said suddenly. ‘I always told myself it will be better than this.’
And I – ten years old – thought she was talking about the hole in the wall, and said: ‘It’ll be all right, Mam, we’ll give it another shot in the morning.’
* * *
The ancestry of act – every moment leading up to haunt that one particular moment. Instead of Mam’s own body breaking itself down in the slow natural entropy of motherhood and age, it became something else altogether – destroyed for her in a strange sort of way. It wasn’t even a vagarious thing, or a whim, or an impulse on the old man’s part – it might have been easier that way. But he had planned it for a long time, I suppose. He wanted a memorial of some sort, an epitaph for himself, a packet of light to emerge and print itself indelibly on his life, to say:
I was once great, look at these great photos I took, look how perfect they are, look how I once lived, I was alive!
Maybe he laboured over that book, maybe he pored over all his contact sheets with a singular intensity, maybe he truly believed that it would reinvent things, or maybe he thought it was a gesture of love – that she could look in its pages and remember herself. Or some vision of herself.
But something other than her life was on display – it was the moments of her body. Her neck and breasts and stomach and legs and spine and moles and pubic hair and ankles and eyes and raven-dark hair under mosquito nets, near fire towers, in a pine-pole camp, in a dark Bronx bedroom, screaming out for some sense of place, lost between the cheap covers of a book.
* * *
The night of the carnival in Castlebar. Eleven years old. The old man was still broad and big-boned, but heavier. A summer evening, and a gulf of men stood around under a marquee of lightbulbs, in white shirts, grey waistcoats, and gigantic red ties, chatting. They ran their fingers through wild emigrating hair. Some of them gazed longingly at a girl in a chartreuse jumper and blossoming lipstick who was selling toffee apples at a stall. Other men stood by and played darts at another stall, keen on the ace of hearts, which might have won them a tiny bottle of Paddy or an ashtray leaping with flowers. Their wives roamed around with plastic bags full of goldfish about to suffocate. From the big wheel – which, in retrospect, wasn’t very big – boys my age were sending down jets of saliva through the gaps in their front teeth on to the onlookers below. I wanted to be up there with them, but Mam had told me to stay with her. She and the old man had been arguing again. He was walking around, fulminating under a flat hat, taking pictures. But after a while he came up to us, camera across his shoulder, and asked Mam if she wanted to go for a spin on the chairoplanes. She nodded and smiled. I was stunned by the smile. There’d been a long period of silence in our house. Mam had stopped eating at the table with him. She was sleeping in the guest room. When they talked, the old man would give a shrug of the shoulders, like a twitch. She spent most of her time at the wall. The huge dark bags had filled out under her eyes, and I suppose they just kept up a semblance of themselves, for my sake, nothing else tying them to one another.
Mam gave me a few pence to get a toffee apple. The girl at the stand had cheeks white as Styrofoam. I watched as the old man launched Mam on the chair, rocking and twirling the seat every time she came around, leaning into her, saying something. For a while she was actually laughing, I couldn’t believe it. Her skirt was flying upwards in the air. A chiffon scarf leaped backwards from her neck, a few silver strands of hair were in view from the scarf, a gasp of teeth all caesium-white. The chairoplane was moving in a circle, faster and faster, a spinning top. Each time she went past, Mam leaned out and said something to him, smiling. He was chuckling as he pushed her. But suddenly she didn’t lean out anymore.
A group of older boys was gathered down by one of the tents, pointing at Mam. Her skirt was billowing and her thin legs were licking outwards under the billow, exposing her underpants. She blanched and shoved her fists down into the skirt to stop it from blowing upwards. As she went around she leaned outwards from the chair, towards the old man, and perhaps there was a bouquet of bile from her lips –
¡Vete al diablo Michael Lyons!
– and the old man suddenly moved away, the chairoplane bringing Mam outwards towards a malachite night, around again to a muskrat-muddy ground where footprints ranged, around, around, around, gradually slowing, her skirt tucked and held between her knees now. The boys moved off, laughing, and my old man went down by the strongarm machine, with a cigarette stooping like a ladder down to his chin, the long sideways swish of his hair Brylcreemed down.
Mam climbed off the chairoplane, smoothing the back of her skirt, hitching up some pantyhose at the knees, her voice a loom, interweaving with carnival notes, spinning out once again. ‘Come, Conor,’ she said to me. I pretended that I didn’t hear and tucked the toffee apple under my jacket so the lads on the wheel couldn’t spit down into it. The moths flared away under carnival lights beneath a massive burlesque of stars.
I saw the old man walking towards the strongarm machine, a giant loping stride as if he’d just stepped out of an advertisement for very strong cigarettes, like he always walked – even when I hated him I loved him for the gigantic way he walked – shoulders swinging, everything in a loop around him. Mam went the other way, moving through the tents and the broken brown bottles. I stood there between them, by the toffee-apple stall, listening to a man play a concertina. I walked towards her as she moved through the sea of shirts and gypsy-fed eyes and faces lacquered with alcohol and – even before I was beside her – the hand, brown and slender, reached out backwards to take mine, a well used reflex. I took her fingers. The spindrift of carnival seeped outwards to further-strung lights of the town. Behind my back the old man was standing by the machine with the giant hammer in the air, against the backdrop of a red and white tent. The carnival clamour wilted as Mam and I moved towards the edge of the car park, and I was wondering if my father was the one sounding out the trilly muscleman bell as we tramped down weeds at the side of a field, Mam and I, circling around, waiting for him to drive us home. From the tents I could still see the boys peeping.
She was famous by then.
The books were censored in Ireland, of course – at first they couldn’t be found anywhere except in his darkroom, although O’Shaughnessy probably had some, too. Maybe it was O’Shaughnessy who showed them to people. Or perhaps they were found by emigrants in obscure European bookstores, sent back home in envelopes with fabulous stamps, young men stumbling across them in the corner of a Parisian stall, tentatively peeling back a cover, feeling the heart thump, looking over a thin shoulder, lifting the page higher. Maybe there were drunken miscreants in the backstreets of Liège who recognised his name on the shabby front cover – men with holes in overcoat pockets so they could reach all the way down to their articulate penises. Or curly-haired artists crazed against the sunsets of a plaza in Rome, denizens of vivacious dreams who loved the photos for what they were, sent them home, wrapped in brown paper to beat the censors.
I had seen a copy. The door of the darkroom had been left open, the old man was gone for the day, and twenty or so were stacked in a corner. At first I didn’t understand that it was her. I just kept flicking the pages. A huge feeling of sickness rose up in me. I scoured quickly through it again, hands shaking. I remember feeling as if a big vacuum was sucking the air from me, dry-retching, a world churning in me, slamming the door, afraid to go home. I had a dream that night. The book was on the coffee table and my schoolteachers were in the house. They picked up the book and smiled, comparing different shots, bits of chalk circling around the pages, one teacher constantly circling her breasts. I kept grabbing the book and tucking it behind the pail of peat near the fireplace so that they wouldn’t see a leg leap from the glass of the coffee table, or a nipple emerge from under a plate of biscuits, or a belly button give an eye from beneath a teacup. But the teachers kept tut-tutting at me, taking it back, some of them holding it up in the air. A giant bamboo cane was raised by the headmaster and I woke, tremulous, walked out into the landing and hunched down, inventing ways of killing my father: make him swallow his chemicals, thump him to a black and white pulp.
Copies got through to people in town, or the rumour of the book did, so that the whole place swivelled and the postman was famous and the telephone operator was abuzz. Father Herlihy flapped in his vestments and made a veiled threat, saying, ‘Blessed be those who know the reasons for things, we must fling all filth out! Fling it out, I say!’ Men in peatbogs who had heard about the photos hailed the heroic eye of my father, caps raised up over centuried soil. Workers from the abattoir, blood-splattered, shit-splattered, passed by our house, looking up at the bedroom windows for a glance which would never come. And the women in their coffee mornings surely set about whispering, lipstick on their teeth, slapping their tongues against the news.