Five Bells Read online

  Lao was not at home that day and Pei Xing had worried about his absence. Her mother was crying. Her father was brave. But she saw him tremble with distress when they pulled the books from the shelves and hurled them through the window to be consumed in a bonfire. He had always believed in ideas, not things, words, not new overcoats, but the violent destruction of his possessions must have been more painful than he could show. And they all had yet to learn that possessions would be the least of the destruction.

  The visit to the First Department Store in 1958, the purchase of the coat and the advent of snow, was the last period, for many years, of unalloyed happiness. Years of famine followed. The snack sellers disappeared from the streets, even the markets of Shanghai became places of scarcity. Black-market trading depleted the little money her parents had saved. Pei Xing’s father, always a thin man, became even thinner, living, it seemed, only on cigarettes, so that when the Cultural Revolution began and the Red Guards came to take him away, he was already half gone. As someone educated abroad and used to negotiating meanings in English and Russian, he was bound to be considered a class traitor and a running dog of imperialists. The weighty terms written in large characters on banners outside their house, the line on the door about the Four Olds, all seemed to bear no relation to her harried parents, but more especially to her father, whose skin was like parchment and who was already translating himself into another world when the Revolution began. He was already thinning in Chinese style, like lines of brushstrokes, a narrow falling vertical, and right to left.

  On the train from Kings Cross they were sweeping around a bay. There were so many bays, peninsulas and headlands in central Sydney. The city geography was fashioned by the irregular shape of the Harbour. It was vaster than Catherine had anticipated, and an improbable cornflower blue. She glimpsed the scintillating water, and the old houses of Woolloomooloo. She saw the pearly backs of the Finger Wharves and a scarf of green grass, rising gently, that was called The Domain.

  Woolloomooloo; she must look it up somewhere. What could it possibly mean? It had to be Aboriginal, she supposed. Would she Google Woolloomooloo? Brendan would have liked that: to Google Woolloomooloo. Brendan would have made a joke of it, or written a neat lyric poem. Or a song, perhaps:

  I met my love, down Woolloomooloo,

  I Googled her, down Woolloomooloo,

  Her googly eyes, her googly hair,

  I Googled my love, down Woolloomooloo …

  By the time Catherine arrived at Central Station she realised she should have walked; it was a sunny day, downhill, and with much to explore. But she found the Inner West line and set off for the Quay. This was her London habit, to assume that the Tube was the Way, to dive underground, then up again, when one might just as well have walked. Central Station was abuzz with the Saturday morning crowd. Calls rang out, loud voices, random vowels and consonants. In what must have been, she later realised, a synesthesic moment, the voices seemed orange, bright orange, and gleaming like graphite.

  Patrick Kavanagh, that was one of his favourites. Brendan loved Kavanagh’s poem ‘On Raglan Road’ and the way it was sung in pubs and by motley, all-and-sundry Irish bands.

  On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew

  That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;

  I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way;

  And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day …

  All those Dublin poets. A’moanin’ and a’groanin’ and thinking forever about love, letting grief be a fallen leaf and crying into their beer.

  Brendan had taught her the words of ‘On Raglan Road’; it was one of hundreds of poems he had committed to memory. A ‘deathless ditty,’ he called it.

  ‘When I die,’ he said, ‘my brain will be riddled with poetry. You should get some surgeon to cut it into lacey slices and find the poetry there.’

  They talked about death a lot, when they were young. It was easy then, so daft and distant, and so unimaginable.

  ‘It’s Irish,’ he said. ‘We’re a sad-hearted lot, it’s why we sing; it’s why we rhyme.’

  ‘And you’re a walkin’-talkin’ all-Irish cliché,’ she responded.

  Brendan laughed, pleased his little sister was so cheeky and bolshie.

  As a university student Catherine moved into a shared house not far from Raglan Road, just to be located where the song had arisen. Brendan said it was fucking brilliant, fucking brilliant, it was! to walk each day up Raglan Road, Patrick Kavanagh’s road.

  Raglan Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin, Ireland, the planet Earth, the Milky Way, the radiant mess of blinking stars, the deep black, the filigree night, the whole endless Universe.

  She would walk up the road humming the song, turn left at Pembroke, into Upper Baggot and Lower Baggot and on to St Stephen’s Green; she would waste time there when she should be studying, meet her friends at Tonehenge or at the bandstand behind the bust of James Joyce. She wandered the tidy pathways, fancy-free, gallivanting, smooching, mucking about and canoodling. With her friend Dymphna Doyle she met boys at the pub, at Hartigan’s, and drank too much. Her mother, had she known, would have said she had a ‘reputation’. And with her brother she sat in shady corners with a packet of digestives and a thermos of tea and listened to him talk about politics and poetry.

  Once – she must have been twelve or thirteen – they had caught the bus together to Phoenix Park and visited the Dublin Zoo to see the Giant Pandas that had arrived as a gift from China. The Pandas were called (how she enjoyed this!) Ming Ming and Ping Ping. There were images on the telly and photographs in the newspaper. Brendan bought the tickets and borrowed somebody’s camera, so there exist mad snaps of them larking about in front of the imported bears.

  Ming Ming and Ping Ping were melancholy in the curious way of the obese, plonked there, ungainly, stuck God-only-knows-why on the Emerald Isle. Their gigantic heads turned slowly, as though impossibly heavy, and their movements were blunt and affectionate, like those of infants. Their black eyes were Gothic, and weirdly unnatural. They sat and ate, ate and sat. But all Dublin was charmed. The crowds at the bear enclosure were well behaved and unprecedented. Everyone said so. It was in the Irish Times. Even Brendan, with a cynical streak as wide as the Irish Sea, loved the surreal element of displacement and the sense of exotic intervention.

  ‘We’ll go to China,’ he announced. ‘Just you and me. We’ll become foreigners, reverse Pandas, and be ridiculously bold!’

  How we cherish those who give us our dreams. In the struggle against dispersion, how we value the casual, cohering suggestion.

  In a single sentence Brendan produced this wild ambition for both of them and presented his sister with wanderlust associations: the Great Wall, cups of tea, bamboo brushes, twirly noodles. China was a machine of formula images and folkloric associations. Pagodas with curled roofs, willow pattern plates. Firecrackers. Red banners. Portraits of Chairman Mao. Catherine loved the idea of becoming a foreigner in the faraway East. Better than a secretary or a schoolteacher, better than a shop-girl in Bewley’s, serving currant buns to old farts and complaining ladies with arthritis and lipstick on their teeth, wedded to their god-awful ailments and imperfections.

  Brendan asked a fellow gawker to take a photograph, there and then. To this day it was the only image Catherine possessed that contained just the two of them. There were family snaps of course, blurry birthdays and weddings and out-of-focus holy communions, but only this one, this special occasion which caught them together, vigorously happy and kooky, mugging with large smiles under a bunting of bright leaves. A piece of panda was just visible: there was one black eye, hanging like a Goth decoration in the bottom left-hand corner.

  It was about that time they all realised that Da was ill. He had always been a smoker, sucking so many that the tips of his fingers looked scorched and he seemed always wreathed, like an idol, in a dim nimbus of smoke. He hacked up muck and had brass-coloured tee
th. There was tobacco on his shirtfront and burn holes in his cardigans. But that was Da: they loved him just the same.

  It must have been a sinister alchemy that turned the outer signs inwards, all that grubby stain and brown discoloration, because one day, after breakfast, he simply keeled over, coming to rest on the kitchen floor, clutching at his chest. Mam looked down upon the man she had shared her life with, and slowly turned him over on his back to face her. He was alive, but gasping, his face magenta and mottled like streaky bacon. Brendan had already left home, but the girls crowded round and exclaimed, shocked to see their mother so calm and Da so unmanned, shaken by the appeal of his fear and the intimation of his mortality. Ruthy cried. Ruthy always cried. Mam called for the ambulance, knowing they came slowly to the Ballymun Estate, but without much choice; and the five sisters were posted in turns at the window to watch for its saviour arrival.

  For almost two weeks Da lingered on, in the ghastly hospital. They all visited together, the mob of them, the whole Healy clan, and one of the nurses whispered ‘thick as thieves’ when she saw them standing together. They decided to ignore her and later mocked her moustache. They were proud and loyal and always looked out for each other.

  One evening, in his extremity, Mam slipped Da a sip of whiskey from a flask, holding his head as if she were holding Jesus. Catherine could not get the image out of her mind, her father dying in a soft and helpless way, her mother cradling him, being Mary, loving him to the end. Though he was sunken and disfigured by his cruel condition, though he dribbled and could not speak and stank of disinfectant and sour breath, Mam loved him to the end just as Mary loved Jesus, full of drowsy sorrow and miraculous belief, aware of the compassionate eye of God and blesséd, as the blesséd Virgin Mary was, First Among Women, Mother of God, Cause of Our Joy and Mystical Rose, so special and so separate in her prayerful weeping.

  When they arrived home it was as if all the hospital smells had followed them: Mam sprayed Lily of the Valley from a can, and placed new mothballs among their winter clothes. These were the confusing smells of her father’s death. These were the smells of grief unlike a fallen leaf.

  Philomena had called out ‘Who’s for tea?’ and they had gathered then, stony-faced, in a circle at the table. Brendan was crying as much as his sisters. He was nineteen, a handsome lad and a hit with the girls, but on that day, at the table, he was returned to boyhood. Red rimmed his eyes and tears ran on his cheeks. Grief had swollen him. He carried it flaring like disease beneath his skin. Catherine loved him all the more when she knew that his grief was like hers. They shared this too, the community of sinners, the peculiar piety of atheists and of sinners unredeemed.

  ‘Those of us that don’t believe in Heaven must stick together,’ he once said, ‘and believe more strongly in this world – here-now – in this gorgeous mad fuck-up.’

  Mam believed: she led a little prayer. They all crossed themselves – even Brendan – and consoled her in this way. Pretending. Performing. In this gorgeous mad fuck-up. Around the table their heads were as beads on a rosary, caught in one beseeching purpose, seeming all the same.

  The time of mourning knitted Brendan and Catherine more closely. She remembers that at the Estate there was never any privacy or quiet. Brendan had moved close to University College, using his scholarship to rent a bleak room in a grimy boarding house, the kind full of shuffling old men muttering nonsense into their shirtfronts as they fumbled for begged cigarettes and tripped on the stairs. He was studying literature by then – something Da never understood – and dressing in second-hand clothes from charity bins which he wore with a rakish and heedless flair. Women adored him. He was in love twice a week, and writing volumes of poems to girls with blue eyes and black hair, listening to dramatically unhappy songs and learning the constellations.

  ‘Our stars come from Ireland,’ he told her more than once.

  For years Catherine had found this saying enigmatic and only after Brendan died did she discover that there was an American poem of this title, by Wallace Stevens. Somewhere in America some poor bastard was thinking of Ireland, thinking of distance, and the turning planet, and of the sky sliding its twinkling diagrams through the dark, lonesome night. Some Irish foreigner, gone-in-the-head, in a new far land. Some Son of Erin staring homesick at the starlit heaven.

  Celestial glissade, Brendan called it, in one of his own poems. East and West confounded.

  They spoke of the stars. They looked at and considered them. As you do. They spoke of Da and death and the absence of the hereafter. They helped each other. And although Brendan had love-affairs non-stop he seemed without intimate friends, and Catherine knew that somehow she provided this too, a kind of comfort of understanding and the forgiveness of all sins. He seemed wholly unmindful of the difference in their age; it was from Brendan she first learned of the abstract and extraordinary operations of sex, from him she heard of Marx, and mixed drinks and the relativity of time, of Wolfe Tone, and the Easter Rebellion and the whole heartbreaking, maddening, fitful-fangled quality of Irish history. Books and music became the trade between them. Band Aid happened (how they both hated Elton John) and yet another Eurovision (‘and who could forget,’ Brendan said, in a high-pitched TV voice, ‘the glorious achievement of Johnny Logan singin’ “Hold Me Now”, bejesus and bemary, ah hold me now, in all his star-spangly, big-eejit Eurovision glory. Go hold yourself, said the tart to the bishop …’)

  So many sentences of Brendan’s speech wafted in Catherine’s memory. They trailed through at chance moments, like a delayed echo. Sometimes she would be altogether elsewhere, minding her own business, getting on with her life, and Brendan’s voice would softly sound; and not only the content of his funny sayings and haphazard rude wisdom, but also his timbre and tone, his particular intonation, his pauses, his sighs, his put-on accents, arriving like a breath on the back of the neck, catching her shivery and unaware.

  For a long time she believed herself a derivative creature, taking all she knew from her older brother. It was a place he gave her, on the rim of his life. So much of what she knew, Brendan had taught her. But her interest in journalism and rock music – these were truly her own. These she cultivated with an exclusive, almost irrational, devotion.

  After the death of their father Catherine felt free to worship U2. There was nothing more beautiful in the world than Bono bursting his lungs out, singing ‘With or Without You’. In the black and white video-clip on the telly he wore a leather waistcoat and no shirt; his naked forearms glistened and he eyed the camera as if he was shagging it. His face advanced and retreated in a system of dark shadows, oh the plea of miserable love, oh the dank seedy magnetism. No tinted glasses; the Edge wore no cap. They were unadorned and not yet so preposterously famous, not yet kings of all Dublin and Champions of the World.

  Catherine found Bono’s voice deeply sexual and romantic; she played him in her head like a dirty secret. At the end of the footage of ‘With or Without You’ Bono emerged in half-light to swing his guitar like a madman.

  Pure genius, that’s what it was. Pure fecking genius, as Brendan would say.

  Bono was so televisually distraught every young woman in Ireland wanted to comfort him, to drag him from the punishing contrasts of Orson Welles cinematography to the quiet soothing twilight of an unmade bed.

  Catherine was fourteen years old. The passions conceived then, felt in the quiver of the heart and the unmentionable spaces of the body, experienced in dear obsessions and constant cravings, these were as significant as any adult formulation of desire, and more direct, more alive, more radically imperative.

  The train swung in a wide arc to emerge alongside sturdy buildings and suddenly pulled into Circular Quay. She’d not noticed the journey, it had been so swift. In this new city she was still moving in guessed distances and miscalculations.

  Where was her ticket? She needed it to exit.

  With or without you. Jesus, she thought, still this fucking eighties’ song, still a younger, sexy
Bono hollering in her head.

  Passengers all around her were rising to leave. There was the etiquette of standing just apart, and waiting, and a polite crowding before the doors. Catherine hitched her shoulder-bag and rose up, out of her childhood.

  And she reflected then that for all her adoration of U2, for all her wish both to follow and not to follow Brendan, when she walked on Raglan, or any road, she still sang the songs that her brother loved, she still heard his voice, and thought of every damn thing that he had taught her, and all the visions he had inspired, and their sweet sibling complicity. And when she closed her eyes at night she still dreamed of going faraway, to Australia, here-now, and eventually to China.

  4

  Circular Quay: she loved even the sound of it. Such was the fabulous allure of the place that by noon the crowds had further grown and voices and activity were multiplied. Secular pilgrims all bent on transcendental satisfactions. Ellie realised her own pedantry, thinking in these terms, yet what moved her was the same longing for accessible wonderment.

  There were streams of people walking in a kind of procession to and from the Opera House, but more still aimlessly strolling or self-amused, just hanging around, lollygagging, taking in the scene. And then there were the regular citizens wanting to catch a ferry, those who must encounter every day this restless quality of excitement. The mix of peoples would be everywhere – at the Eiffel Tower and the Acropolis, at the Forbidden City and Borobudur, at Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon, at the Louvre and Uluru, at art museums that were architecturally wavy or contorted. Monuments addressed us this way: pause here, consider. What hunger is driving you? What loss? What ambition? How does this place figure in your dreams?