Away Read online

  Esther pulls the quilt up closer to her neck as the cool lake air reaches her from the window. She will not sleep on this final night, instead she will tell herself the long story until dawn, the way old Eileen had told it to her during after-school twilights.

  In her mind’s eye, the young girl her great-grandmother was flickers like a distant torch on the opposite side of an ocean. Esther sees the dance old Eileen’s arms performed as she told the story, her hands moving like moths towards the flame.

  At the quarry the men will work all night, shifting the gears of their machines under artificial light.

  Esther, too, will work all night whispering in the dark.

  AT first it was believed that Mary would die; that she would waste away, abandoning a body that had already been “left behind.” As time went by, however, and she seemed stronger and more beautiful than ever, it began to appear that other steps would have to be taken. She did nothing but sing quietly – there was no other form of speech – the songs she had invented during her night vigil with the corpse. She performed her chores methodically and easily – too easily, her mother thought – as milk turned to butter with a few light touches of the churn and eggs were produced by hens the moment the girl stepped outside to collect them. Her bread rose to ridiculous heights in the oven and the sweet berries for which the islanders spent hours searching began to appear in profusion all around her mother’s cabin.

  As streams of golden tea poured from silver teapots all over the island in the following months, the women, young and old, considered the predicament. They feared Mary, but did not wish to offend her, fearing the retribution of “the others” more. They wondered if she would bring a changeling into the world and, if so, what dark powers it would have. Some of them secretly hoped that the girl had been given the ability to do cures, particularly for the complaints of women and the diseases of children.

  The men, when they gathered round their turf fires at night, never mentioned Mary’s name at all, but a mental picture of her stirred their thoughts and sometimes their groins, leading them to believe that they must avoid her altogether lest they begin to be astray themselves. One by one they crept into the damp church on the bay, slipped behind the dark curtain of the confessional, and whispered their secret longings into the ear of Father Quinn. It was when this venerable person, himself, started having unsettling dreams concerning red hair and snow-white breasts that he decided something must be done before the whole island became possessed.

  Father Quinn was not a young man, but not so old as to be beyond desire. When he awoke some mornings, his normally severe countenance in the silvered glass seemed altered, inflamed by something just beneath the skin that wanted to burst out. Mary might have been in his dreams all night disguised as a tree or even as a single leaf moving in the breeze just beyond his grasp, and he straining to touch it. All day, then, he would be remembering the veins of that leaf and its delicate structure.

  It was with a great deal of reluctance that he climbed the road that led from Church Bay to the girl’s cabin. He would swing incense over her, thoroughly drench her with holy water. He brought along his censer, a glass vessel filled with liquid, and a chip of the tooth of Saint Patrick. He carried dried stems of heather with which to thrash the “other” from her if need be. He had begun to pray before he left his cold rooms at the back of the church, and he had continued to pray as he fortified himself with a drop of the miraculous whiskey stored conveniently nearby. He prayed that her cheeks would fade, her bosom sag, her teeth rot, and her eye lose its lustre. He prayed that her waist would thicken and that a wart would grow on her nose. And he prayed that if the Lord could not arrange these alterations he himself would cease to be tormented by her, her infirmity would cease to be his affliction, that she would be taken completely by “the others,” and that nothing disturbing would be left in her place.

  Mary, however, had gone, as she did on certain days now, down to search for he who had been given as a gift to her. He had fallen into her life as Wednesday falls into the middle of the week, and it was often Wednesdays that she sought and found him. Her pale swimmer. It was Wednesday when he had washed into her arms, and he would crash over her, she knew, every Wednesday for eternity. Her wave. Her breaker.

  Wednesdays she woke with the smell of the sea in her room, her mouth requesting fire and salt and her arms aching. Something like thunder shook the furniture of the cabin and beyond its walls fuchsia and whitethorn trembled. She ate handfuls of her mother’s precious peppercorns and rubbed her thighs until they burned with the turf that awaited the fire, until her body, inside and out, shrieked and sang, and the little grey village outside the window stepped backwards and withdrew. Then she burst from the house to the sea, in fever.

  She bathed immediately, loving the weight of drenched clothing that pulled her farther into the sea and then the lightness of her limbs as she threw her clothing back to the shore. She floated, and waited.

  His song was like no other song. It rasped and whimpered and told her secrets she had known for centuries. Her arms were full of him, he entered her and passed right through her. He enveloped her like her own skin and she a stone sinking under his weight. He forced her to want other elements to breathe beyond that which was available in the ordinary air, and then, moments later, the air was no longer ordinary. If she had been asked to describe him, she would have said that he was the exact spot where the sea touches land, the precise moment of the final reach of surf. That was the place and the time of him. She would forever, then, seek shorelines and beaches.

  Father Quinn dragged his equipment laboriously towards Mary’s door and was met by the handsome bulk of Mary’s mother leaning over her vegetable patch, examining the new green leaves of potato plants.

  “I’ve come to bring Mary back, Norah,” he said, “by whatever means God sees fit.”

  “Well, she’s not here,” said the woman. “Even she that is here is not here.”

  “And what does this creature do all day?” asked the priest, trying to keep pictures of her red mouth and white throat out of his mind as he spoke.

  “She’s mostly singing,” said her mother, “and whispering to someone I can’t see.”

  “Does she pray, then?”

  “No, it’s not prayers she’s saying.”

  “Well, I’m certainly hoping that it’s you who are praying, Norah Slattery. This cabin will be needing all the prayers anyone might be whispering.”

  “Sometimes it’s rhymes she says.” Mary’s mother looked embarrassed. “Rhymes,” she added, lowering her voice, “with words like heart and treasure and darling in them. The songs have those words as well.”

  The priest’s own heart sprang in his chest and then quieted. His conscience slapped him hard. He wanted to hear these songs sung by Mary’s own mouth, and she singing them for him alone. He looked down at his censer and holy-water bottle lying on the earth where he had dropped them. They look ridiculous, he thought, glinting in the sun with potato plants and weeds bobbing all around them.

  “I’ve brought some holy water,” he said absently, “in case it might help. That and some incense.”

  “She won’t be back till sundown, that’s certain,” said Mary’s mother. She picked up her apron and let it fall again, looking oddly girlish as she did so, despite her age and size. Then she turned her face away and made her confession. “I can’t help thinking, Father,” she said, “that she’s the same daughter that I gave birth to. Not a hair on her head has changed and she still calls me Mother. Is it, do you think, Father, that this is what ‘they’ would have me believing?”

  “Consider this,” the priest replied. “ ‘They’ leave an exact replica of that which they’ve taken, in its place. This girl is an exact replica. She is here but she is not. The word ‘exact’ is important. Every hair that’s on her head is an exact replica of every hair that was on her head. Do you see it, Norah? There is nothing about her would have changed except that she is changed. The questio
n is how to get her back. Sometimes it takes seven years. Sometimes they never come back. Sometimes they waste away.”

  “Should I be turning her out of doors then, Father, if she’s not my daughter at all?”

  “Ah no, Norah, for if Mary were to come back she would need to exchange herself, and she wouldn’t be able to find herself to exchange.”

  “Oh,” said Mary’s mother, confused, “it’s like that then, is it?”

  “Yes,” Father Quinn said in a tired voice, “that’s what it’s like … exactly.” He glanced at the tooth chip where it rested in its silver-and-glass reliquary. It looked powerless and decayed. For a moment he wondered whether it had been broken from a human, never mind a divine tooth. He thought of Mary’s gleaming teeth, of her mouth. “That and her calling herself by a different name.” He was silent for a moment, thinking. “Still,” he said eventually, “it might be a good thing for her to be off the island, were she to leave it in a natural way.”

  The moment he spoke these words he experienced a feeling of loss so shattering he was forced to catch his breath. Composing himself he added, “In a natural way, as if she really were Mary, not this … Moira.” He remembered her walking the roads of the island, her hair a-fly. Then he imagined the roads without her on them. He was not fond of the island’s roads, he decided; the hills, the sea stirred his heart, but not the roads.

  “And what way would that be, Father?” Mary’s mother stood with her hands clasped piously in front of her.

  “Death or marriage,” the priest said, surprising himself with the bluntness of his answer. “Both natural, so that if Mary came back she’d know where to look for herself.”

  “But who would be marrying one who is away?”

  “One who doesn’t know,” replied Father Quinn. “One who doesn’t know,” he repeated slowly, though he believed in his heart that there were plenty who would marry her skin and hair even if they did. “Or perhaps,” he continued, a new idea striking him, “one who knows but doesn’t believe.”

  “In God!?” asked Mary’s mother, shocked.

  “Doesn’t believe,” answered the priest, “that a person can be away at all.”

  BRIAN O’Malley’s cottage was situated some two miles east of Ballyvoy in the collection of dwellings that went by the name of Coolanlough. Hills swept up on either side of it, rising to the cliffs a mile away. To approach these promontories you had to walk beside the still lakes known as Dhu, Faddon, and Crannog – the latter with its ancient man-made island floating on its surface. From the cliffs you could look at Rathlin Island and the waters of the Moyle that churned in front of it, or you could turn to the left and examine Ballycastle Bay and the town that rose behind it. With your back to the sea you could watch the swift shadows of clouds darken the surfaces of the already dark lakes. Below, on the beach, there might be one or two dulse gatherers and, to the left and right of Rathlin, fishing boats bobbing like small, floating sea birds. Moving purposefully past these curraghs might be the Rathlin-Ballycastle ferry. This small vessel knew no schedule, returned sometimes hours, sometimes days after it set out. Once when it was owned by Sean MacDonnell, who lived on the land, it wintered on the island. Once when it was owned by Fergus MacFee, an islander, it wintered on the land; its furious respective owners cursing God and the sea.

  Father Quinn had been lucky and unlucky. The day was fair, the crossing easy. But unlucky because, since the day was fine, he was unlikely to find his friend Brian O’Malley at home. The priest carried a copy of Horace under his arm, guiltily, knowing that this was not the real reason for his visit. Normally the two men met once or twice a month to talk about Latin, mathematics, and philosophy, and O’Malley’s cottage was the best place for that. But, Quinn reminded himself, he should be grateful that the walk from Ballycastle to Ballyvoy was not as lengthy as that to Coolanlough, and on a fine day Ballyvoy was where O’Malley was most likely to be found.

  Eventually the priest rounded a bend in the road that led up from the harbour town. Now he could see the straggling cottages and cabins that made up the village. He heard wind and birds and his own determined footsteps on the gravel, then the expected sound of sustained chant coming from the hedgerows. Quinn joined in unconsciously, mouthing noun declensions, moving with facility into verbs and then shouting enthusiastically long Latin sentences concerning Roman campaigns until the other chanting voices ceased and a tall form emerged from an opening door in the shrubbery that lined the side of the road.

  “Well,” said the schoolmaster, “how is it that you’ve come on a day such as this?”

  Behind him the voices that had been dutifully reciting broke into chaos. Words and laughter burst out from summer leaves. Great scuffling erupted.

  “Creeping up like this you might have been one of the inspectors of the old days.” Both men remembered when hedge schools such as this had been forbidden by law. “I’ve most of the children here though they’re itching to be gone, if it’s some talk you’re after.”

  Father Quinn was passing the old leather book from hand to hand nervously. Four or five blackbirds paced at his feet. “It’s about something else I’ve come,” he said, “besides Latin.”

  Two small boys rolled out of the entrance and wrestled in the dust on the road. The dark birds spun away.

  “Back in with you,” roared O’Malley. “On with Caesar. Do the part on England. Recite in whispers.”

  The boys disappeared. Hisses slipped through the wattle, thatch, and lattice of the old structure. “Britannia est magnum insulum,” the voices announced in unison.

  “Magna insula!” shouted O’Malley, tossing his head back briefly in the direction of the greenery. “We’ve been looking carefully at your Lives of the Saints, if it’s that. And grateful we are for the loan of it.”

  “Fine, fine,” said Father Quinn, “but, no, it’s hot that.”

  “Should I send them off, then?” The whispering beyond the leaves stopped. The very air seemed to listen. The priest looked furtively up and down the road as if he were about to perform an act for which there should be no witnesses. “If you have no objection,” he said, “it might be best.”

  O’Malley turned and entered the shrubbery. “Two more sentences,” he demanded, “and then be gone for the day. And say them slowly and clearly in the voice of Caesar.”

  “Insula natura triquetra, cuius unum latus est contra Galliam,” the children droned. “Huius lateris alter angulus, qui est ad Cantium, quo fere omnes ex Gallia naves appelluntur, ad orientem solem, inferior ad meridiem spectat.”

  “Until tomorrow, then!” O’Malley boomed. “And think about Caesar.”

  Thirteen children exploded through the makeshift door and hurtled past the priest. Most were barefoot. Father Quinn watched them scatter across the road in the direction of freedom, their clothing like torn pennants waving from fragile poles.

  Shortly afterwards, their tormentor appeared in the sun. “There’s one or two of them have the makings of a scholar,” he said. “But there’s not a poet in the lot of them. More’s the pity.”

  “And your own poems?” asked the priest, politely.

  “Ah those … they come now, if they come at all … very slowly.” The schoolmaster looked suddenly shy. “I’ve one on the recent shipwreck though, if you’d like to hear it.”

  So, thought the priest, the silver and the whiskey were not divine providence after all. “Speak it to me,” he said.

  O’Malley cleared his throat:

  Their nautical hearts were brave

  And the cliffs of Antrim steep.

  Lordly was the wave

  And darkling was the deep.

  The ship had sailed a thousand leagues,

  A thousand leagues or more,

  But the sight of the cliffs of Antrim

  Was the site of its final shore.

  Through the several verses of the poem the priest admired his friend’s strong face, noticing the lines on the forehead and the cut of the angular bones, an
d then the creases made by worry, thought, and kindness around the dark blue eyes. He needed a haircut, thought the older man, but the hair itself was neatly combed, though greying and thin at the temples. Altogether the man had a pleasant countenance. What would she who was over on the island think, he wondered, of a face such as this.

  The schoolmaster finished his recitation and looked towards the stones at his feet. One of his laces had broken this morning. He mostly kept his poems private, guarded against the world. But Father Quinn was his closest friend – though he came from the island and they met infrequently – and his verses were received by the priest in a friendly manner. Their views on certain other subjects, however, diverged dramatically.

  “Fine,” said Father Quinn now. “A fine poem and filled with noble sentiments.”

  Brian O’Malley took the compliment, as always with mild embarrassment. “Oh, there’s nothing in it,” he maintained quietly, “that hasn’t been said before.”

  Both men were silent, knowing this to be true.

  “Shall we walk towards the cottage then?” O’Malley touched the priest lightly on the shoulder.