Five Bells Read online

  Catherine ordered a second coffee. The dandelion fountain was surprisingly captivating. White ibis with curved black beaks long as a scythe, and potbellies, like old men, were treading the puddles beneath the fountain, unmindful of café-goers and shoppers passing by. You could kick them like a football if you were so inclined, since they barely flinched as human legs passed their way.

  Two young travellers, probably from Sweden – blonde girls with skimpy shorts, tanned legs and exclamatory manners – took turns having their photos taken in front of the dandelion. Carefree, the word was. Their parents were probably executives of Volvo or owned rental property in Iceland and were off now, on a yacht, sailing a sparkling fjord, communicating only sparsely and by electronic mediation. But Catherine had dragged her past and her family with her. They hung around. She thought of them often and with a kind of doleful, compelling concern. Most of all she thought of Brendan, though he was no longer in the world, and it was a riddle to her how powerfully the dead continued, how much space they took up with their not-here bodies. Brendan lay trapped in her atoms and in the folds of her brain, he had infiltrated, somehow, the way damp entered the clammy rooms of those stinky old flats in Dublin, leaving blotches like blossoms and streaks going nowhere.

  Catherine would ring her mother soon, or perhaps send a postcard of the Opera House. Or of the Bridge, or Bondi Beach, or a cute kangaroo, aerodynamically leaping. Filial piety, that’s what Father Maroney would call it. Dutiful daughter.

  Last Saturday, her very first in the new southern world, Catherine swam in the ocean. Instead of heading off to see the monuments, she had decided to find holiday indulgence and enjoy the hot weather. She watched children leaping in the surf and sun-worshippers posing their brown bodies, stretched unselfconscious, on the new-moon arc of Bondi sand. It had been a day awash with light, rather like this one, and the sound of the sea falling onto the shore was nothing like home, but a kind of joyous plash! as the water curled and foamed and dispersed, a blue muscle, turning, and a commodious body one might rest in. She wondered if this was how sex felt for a man, to be surrounded, to be held, to be dashed somewhere, gasping.

  Luc, she decided, would love Bondi Beach. All that flesh and the mystery of such an immersion, one’s body buoying, the currents, the kiddie-excitement of a breaking wave.

  She had seen the body-surfers flying prone on the angle of a swell, following the ridge of the water, their heads bonneted by froth. Energy and massive churn pulled them to the shore. She had seen children no older than eight fly towards her on blue boards. They lay on their bellies and held out their heads like turtles, and smiled as they fled past. Everyone’s face was bright; everyone glistened and was animated.

  And she had seen a woman her age swim directly towards the horizon, her arms turning in assured and rhythmical strokes. There was a moment of envy; to swim like that. And a moment of terror. To go so far out, to push the body into distance. As she lolled in the churning shallows Catherine resolved to take swimming lessons. She would be that woman, on a kind of journey, going far out into the ocean.

  In the summer of the year following Catherine and Brendan’s political deal, their mother took them to the village of Ballinspittle, to see the moving Madonna. Not the others, just them. They needed a miracle, Mam said, to show them back to the Way.

  Children in the village had witnessed the outdoor statue of Mary opening and closing her eyes and moving her hands in the tiniest wave, and their fervour and testimony attracted pilgrims by the thousand. All over Ireland people had heard of this marvel, and then all over the world. Some said Our Lady had actually taken a step forward, in a diamond of white light, radiant with grace; others that it was a nod or a blink or a wee tilt of the head, a body-message to the faithful. The Spirit was among them; it had only to be witnessed.

  On an overcast day in July, Mam, Catherine and Brendan boarded a chartered bus full of nuns to take them to the miracle in County Cork. Brendan and Catherine sat together at the back of the bus, feeling ill with the journey and shuddery with every bone-shaking jolt of the road, and were surprised by how loudly the nuns chattered and the topics of their conversation. Mam sat up the front with an old biddy and looked particularly pious. It felt like forever.

  When they arrived in Ballinspittle they found the place invaded: ‘Every Irish eedjit is here,’ whispered Brendan; ‘every sad fuckin headcase.’ Pilgrims were everywhere, spilling out of cars and buses. A public address system, from which prayers were broadcast, was in full crackly voice. There were little stalls, selling holy objects made of plastic, and toilets set up at the base of the statue. The Virgin Mary was disappointing, truth be told. A figure in cast concrete, ringed with eleven light-bulbs that signified her halo, she stood quietly in her little grotto, twenty feet up, and seemed obdurately disposed not to move at all. Catherine and Brendan stood where they were told and looked up at the statue. But nothing moved. They stood for ages and ages, with Mam looking too, and stood even when rain began to fall and others went for shelter.

  ‘It takes patience,’ Mam said. ‘It takes patience to see what is true in this world.’

  Mam bought them each a keyring souvenir of the event, and some Lourdes holy water for Gran, and a little badge with Mary’s face, but her children could tell she was mightily disappointed.

  ‘We didn’t go in the right spirit,’ she said softly. ‘Our hearts weren’t open.’

  Catherine hugged her mother and wished for her sake that the Virgin had danced a jig and blessed them all in a strident yawp. Or better still, just raised her white hand in a silent gesture, the way the priest does, quiet-like and calm and well-understood, at the shuffling, slightly sorrowful end of the holy mass. Just that: the simple, direct, loving code of the hand. It would have sufficed. It would have offered her mother meaning.

  Mam hugged her back. It was a rare moment of concord.

  Brendan also felt sorry for Mam. ‘It was me,’ he said meekly. ‘I spoiled it for you.’

  He glanced at Catherine to show that he cared for his mother, though she knew of his scorn and his atheism and his belief that Mam was merely gullible and had wasted their money. She loved her brother for that pretence, for trying to comfort Mam. And for the fact that he cared what his little sister thought.

  In the evening Catherine saw her parents take a small glass of sherry together – another sign that all was not right with the world. Illnesses, wakes, these were the sherry occasions. They spoke together in low, hushed voices. Da smoked a cigarette. Catherine knew her mother was describing the trip and the nuns. She was telling him of the low-wattage halo and the little stalls selling trinkets; she was reconvening the details so they would make a good story. Da nodded and looked serious. In the yellow light of the kitchen there they were, her parents sharing a trip they could not afford, entering into the limited circle of their own experience, having never moved beyond Ireland, and little beyond Dublin.

  Only years later did Catherine realise what an important event this was for her mother, to journey with other souls to perform an act of witness, to see her own credulousness multiplied among the faithful, all looking at the same time in the same direction, all waiting for epic-scale confirmation and a fan of light from heaven. Afterwards, Mam spoke often of Ballinspittle, so that eventually the sense of failure fell away, and what replaced it was a tale of communal hope and the ardent wish to see something not on the telly. Her tone was solemn and prayerful: ah, you should have seen them, all lookin’ there together, all eyes fixed on her face, and the faith of it, and the love, even when the rain came down, and we all stood there together, patiently waiting, patiently waiting in the rain for her holy sign.

  After Ballinspittle Catherine and Brendan were linked inseparably. It marked the understanding that they were truly alike. The older girls bothered her less, content to know Catherine was peculiar, and the youngest, Ruthy, only seven years old, was sure her big sister was special because she had been taken to see the statue. Catherine had given R
uthy the moving-Madonna keyring, and was pleased to see how treasured it was. Mam seemed to worry just the same, but practised a measured forbearance, apparently resigned. Catherine felt her relinquishment as a kind of relief; she was liberated now into a career of self-understanding.

  Catherine paid for her drink and left the café. The dandelion fountain shone. She paused and gazed into it. A sixties’ object for sure, when water features popped up everywhere in modernist cities, smoothing crude box-shapes and ugly façades, nostalgic for genuine and replaceable nature. This liquid dandelion stood alone, a memorial, perhaps. Not beautiful, exactly, but buoyant somehow, light, luminous and strangely sensual. There was something in the falling of fine water drops that reminded Catherine obliquely of snow; and snow reminded her of the story Brendan loved above all others.

  At his funeral she had read from James Joyce’s The Dead. She had stood before the casket, in front of all those people, and Mam crying her eyes out, and her sisters with their hankies, and the priest just behind her, hovering with disapproval, and read the last paragraph of James Joyce’s short story. The congregation in Our Lady of Victories looked distracted and confused. Some thought she was gone in the head to read out this something-or-other, blatant and disrespectful and certainly unreligious blather, but it was what Brendan would know, his literary world, and what he would have liked. And how did it go, now, the section about snow falling general, all over Ireland? Over the plain, over the hills, over the dark Shannon waves; then over the cemetery where the beautiful young man was lying buried? And that fellow, Gabriel his name was, looking out the window:

  His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

  Upon all the living and the dead. This was how Brendan haunted her, visiting at unexpected moments, falling over her, as if from the sky, smoothing her own definition. So that Catherine might be rising from coffee in a good mood and remember his funeral, so that she might be walking in the sunshine in another country entirely, so that she might be heading for the Opera House or wishing she had written to her mother, and think suddenly, irresistibly, of the intimate presence of snow.

  3

  Their connection began when they were both nine, and together watched her father with the axe. Under the pepper tree he raised it high, and brought it down on a scraggly white chicken, which he had tied, just one loop, with a rope to the chopping block. Father was unsure of his aim, perhaps, or worried that the bird would flap away. But in the act itself there was no trace of uncertainty or worry, just irreproachable gravity and the blade fast-falling, just the whoosh of an intention sharper and heavier than most.

  Only seconds before, the doomed chicken was making a throaty, moaning sound, inert but for its roving and nervous eye. Ellie saw it blink, and blink again, and wondered if chooks had thoughts or memories, or heard songs in their heads, as she often did. She held James’s hand tightly and pulled him close. In the olive-green light of the backyard he looked nervous and afraid. His face was pinched, his mouth was firm, his brown eyes were moist and suddenly huge. Clouds flew above them, wind, a single bird.

  Then the axe-blade fell. The chicken’s head popped off – no big deal – but when her father untied the body a ghastly thing happened. The body writhed a little, uprighted itself, then lurched away in a swoony, directionless run. James laughed, but looked terrified. As the headless chicken ran past he bent down and swooped it into his arms. He clutched hard, trying to still it, trying to make the lively body die. His eyes entreated – who knows what? – and filled with tears. Ellie could hear her own rapid breathing and knew that time was rocking into shape as water does, pooling around this boy’s face and his blazing desperation.

  When her father prised the chicken from James’s grip his shirt was bloody and bespattered. The boy shook and began to cry, and Ellie opened her arms and took him gently into her child’s embrace. She knew then, even with her own heart galloping and her senses all alive, that she was the calm one, that in the circle of killing she could watch and somehow know not to recoil. She knew too that there was a gap between death and life, a remnant vigour, a kind of puzzled searching.

  Do humans search like this, looking stupidly for what is missing? Would a human body run? Crazy-like, with no head?

  Ellie was possessed by this idea, its exhilarating horror. As an adult it will occur to her that this was her first moment of philosophy, when she found in the world a seductively bamboozling question. Yet in the vast stillness of the moment she saw the answer in James’s face: yes, crazy-like-with-no-head, a human would still search.

  Ellie decided to walk to Central Station, take the train to the quay, and then return on the bus. She wanted this walk downhill through the Saturday crowds, already trailing out of coffee shops and cycling past with the newspapers, already responding with like heart to the glorious weather. Faces evanesced before her, rose up and fell away, and she thought of the negligent flicker of perception that negotiates any crowd, of how in the champagne morning light they were all caught in flux and lustre, igniting, appearing, lit with energetic purpose. In the grounds of the local primary school a market was being established; Ellie could see stallholders setting up trestle tables and unpacking their wares. They were holding cardboard cups of coffee and lightly chatting. It would be a good day. Even from across the road you could hear optimism ringing in their voices. But Ellie was still thinking of James at nine years old, and of herself, self-centred. She hadn’t really cared for his suffering. She had wanted high drama.

  Her mother was suddenly there, surveying the mess. ‘Bloody hell,’ she said, ‘what were you thinking, Charlie?’ Ellie noticed her father become submissive at his wife’s reproach. He was still holding the chicken, its feathers mucky with gore, the event a crude wreckage, and the head forgotten, ridiculous, in the sawdust beside the block. Ellie saw him pass the upside-down carcass from one hand to the other, then wipe his left hand on his trousers, leaving a faint greasy smear. They exchanged words, her parents, and then her mother seized James by the wrist and dragged him away. Ellie saw in her mother’s glance that she was also stained; holding James she had printed chicken blood onto her clothes. So there was the blood-print, the sky, her father dangling the chicken. Images lined up for her memory, for the future, for wild or idle surmise, this little collection that made up the blunder of the moment, and of James’s pure fear, and of her own shameless sense of triumph.

  In this pause lay the inkling of a net of relationships. Ellie registered with sure judgement the range of her affections: she loved them all – loved – her mother, her father, her schoolfriend James, all of them caught in this drama with the headless chicken that would not do the right thing and straightaway, as it should, just lie down and die.

  Ellie was in the kitchen, dressed in a clean cotton blouse. She had tucked her hair behind her ears, and sat silent, watching, fiddling with the hem of her skirt. James had been on his knees, vomiting into a plastic bucket, but was now perched on their high stool, not yet settled, with a glass of water in his hands and her mother leaning towards him. She was soothing, whispering words that Ellie could not quite hear. They would be the right words; her mother was good at that. They would be words gathered from the air, or so it had always seemed, and fitted into just the right sentences, in just the right order, and spoken just right, like a special trick, like the way a dog knows when to nuzzle you and when to stay far away. She recognised the low tone of voice and the lovely comfort residing there. James was hectic with crying and barely consolable. He had the glazed look of a child too small for the enormity of all he’d seen. His shoulders hunched, he trembled a little. Ellie’s mother plucked at a box of tissues and handed him fat, floral bunches.

  Like James, Ellie was a single child. She learnt only as an adult of the brother who preceded her, dying of infant leukaemia at the age of four. William, his name was. Her parents had never spoken of W
illiam, but their devotion to her was his ghostly bequest. They loved her double and found her existence adorable. Ellie watched her mother’s attention as she calmed James and offered him an arrowroot biscuit, as he nibbled around its edges, like a storybook rabbit, as he brushed the crumbs away, like a girl, she thought meanly, like a scaredy-cat girl, and began gradually to see where he was and what a bother he had made.

  In her watching Ellie glimpsed her mother’s power, this remaking of damaged things and events within words, this placing of sentences, carefully, as a balm over a wound. At last her mother straightened. She lifted James under the armpits, hoisted him upwards and straightened him too.

  ‘Time to go home,’ she said. She untied her apron, folded it swiftly, and held an arm out to show that Ellie was allowed to accompany them. The kitchen light was pale yellow; it was always yellow in the kitchen. Every kitchen in the world, thought Ellie, is always yellow. James and her mother both had round yellow faces.

  They had walked the gravel road of their seaside town, passing Mr Anderson-with-the-large-belly who was outside watering his garden, flailing the plastic hose, this way and that, like a private game or an emblem of his own distraction; past the Covichs’ (who were divorced) and the Hallidays’ (who were Catholics), and the Maloufs’ (who were from Lebanon, wherever that was), past the empty block in which Patterson’s Curse flourished its purple blossoms (Dad said it could kill horses, so Ellie thought it magnificently dangerous), to the end of the street, where there was only James’s house, an unrepaired weatherboard, half-falling down, with holes in the roof that let the rain in (James had told her) and beyond that, the sand dunes, the coast, and the true-blue Indian Ocean. The house had a wretched, decomposing look, as though it was caught in a process of unmaking that affected no other house on the street. The verandah had planks of wood missing and a broken rail, and an iron roof, rusted orange, that was peeling away. One of the side-walls was crudely patched with a warped sheet of three-ply. It looked like a blister, just hanging there. A surprisingly vigorous rosemary bush grew by the letterbox. Ellie watched her mother tear a woody stem in an absentminded gesture, rub the little leaves together and sniff at her fingers as she passed.