The Island 3

Tabulae mundi mihi, The Island

The Island 3

Nexis Pas

© 2010 by the author

When we arrived in Munfrees in May 1951, the village was home to perhaps a hundred people. The many empty houses testified that the population had once been larger. When a family moved away or the last member died, a relative might claim a vacant house if it were better than his current one, but most of the empty houses were left to decay. A house known to be abandoned was considered to belong to the village, and, after a ‘decent’ interval of a few weeks, the other residents stripped it of useable materials. The walls of an abandoned house usually lasted long after the roof had gone, the plaster gradually falling off to reveal the stones beneath. In time, even the walls disappeared as the stones were scavenged for other uses. When we moved to Munfrees, only some thirty houses were inhabited.

Most of the houses had two stories. The ground floor was usually divided into two rooms, a larger room that was a combination kitchen and living area and a smaller room used as a bedroom or a sitting room. A flight of steep stairs led upward into a sleeping area under a steeply pitched roof, again usually divided into two rooms. The front and back doors were squarely in the middle of the ground floor, with one window to each side of the doors on the ground floor. Some houses had a row of windows on the first floor as well. The houses were heated only by the fireplace in the kitchen. In the early 1950s all the inhabited houses were whitewashed.

It would be another seven years before electricity arrived in Munfrees. Until that time the only lighting was provided by candles or lanterns or the kitchen fires. There was no running water, and we relied on the water in the streams flowing down from the hills, rainwater collected in barrels, and wells.

The inhabitants of Munfrees were poor. Oddly enough, however, the people I met in the 1950s were better off than their parents and grandparents had been. So many people had left the village that those who remained benefited. The size of the pot remained the same, but there were fewer people living off it. Sheep and wool were the principal products of the farmers in the village. Everyone had a small garden plot to grow potatoes and sometimes vegetables—cabbage, kale, turnips, onions, and carrots.

There was a pub run by one of the Aherns. It was a small, one-room building. As was common at that time in rural Ireland, only men patronised it. Most evenings probably ninety percent of the adult males in the village stopped into the pub, if only for a few minutes.

The only other ‘business’ in Munfrees was Feelihy’s shop. Feelihy’s was an emporium. It sold groceries—sugar, tea, flour, canned goods—and supplies—the white gas we used for our lanterns, matches, caps, top boots, cloth, kettles, string, paper. If Feelihy’s didn’t have what you needed, it wasn’t to be had in Munfrees. If Mrs Feelihy, who ran the shop, bought a carton of tinned pears, we ate pears until all the tins had been sold and she ordered a new box of tinned fruit. If she bought a bolt of blue-and-white-striped cloth, all new clothes were sewn with blue-and-white-striped cloth until the bolt had been finished and she purchased a new bolt. An amazing variety of goods was packed into the store. It might take Mrs Feelihy a few minutes to find what you wanted, but she often had it. If she didn’t, then you had to wait until you or someone willing to buy what you needed for you went to Killybegs. Mrs Feelihy was also the post mistress, as well as the main conduit of information in the village. A stop at Feelihy’s was as much a visit to exchange news as it was a matter of purchasing goods.

Feelihy’s sold nothing that was perishable. We either grew our own vegetables or purchased them from our neighbours. A farmer who decided to butcher a lamb or a sheep might be willing to sell some of the meat to others. More often, it was simply traded against a future promise to return a like amount of meat when you yourself slaughtered an animal. Most households had chickens for eggs and eventually the pot. The butcher’s cart stopped in Munfrees on Tuesdays. He sold mostly bacon and sausages. Occasionally he might have beef or pork, but few of the villagers could indulge in those luxuries. The injunction against eating meat on Friday and other fast days was largely meaningless in Munfrees. Meat was not part of the daily diet for most people.

Munfrees was then part of the Gaeltacht, the area in which the main language in everyday use is Irish. Both my mother and my aunt spoke some Irish, enough to get by. My primary schooling coincided with one of the government’s unsuccessful attempts to teach Irish in the schools, and I had been exposed to it. I quickly picked up what I needed. Many of the older people spoke no English or knew only a few words. Most of the conversations I report in this work took place in Irish.

Like many rural Irish settlements, the houses extended along both sides of the road in what is now called a ‘linear village’. The house that my mother and aunt had inherited was at one end slightly separated from the nearest house by several vacant lots and decayed buildings. It followed the general pattern of having two rooms on the ground floor and two on the floor above. My mother and aunt each took one of the rooms on the upper floor. To my delight, I had a room for myself, the second one on the ground floor. That was the first time I had a room of my own.

The house was dark. There were only three windows on the ground floor, two at the front facing the street, and a third one in the kitchen in the back. For economy we lit the gas lantern only at night. I did my schoolwork sitting next to the window in my bedroom, and my aunt and mother similarly worked at a table drawn up next to one of the windows in the kitchen. I was allowed to read outside during the day if the weather was good.

The property had one feature that intrigued me. My explorations on the day after we arrived soon led to a discovery.

‘What is that building?’

My mother crossed to the window where I was standing and looked out. ‘It’s a cow shed. Uncle kept a cow.’

‘Where is the cow?’

‘Mr Thomas Ahern has been taking care of it since Uncle died. We told him to keep it, and in turn he has agreed to supply us the milk that we need.’

‘But it’s our cow. We must get it back.’

The idea of owning our own cow appealed greatly to me. My knowledge of cows was limited to the friendly brown and white creatures smiling from the pages of books. I knew that they mooed and wore bells around their necks, and I knew that they ‘gave’ us milk. I had no idea of the process involved, but the notion that cows made us a present of milk was firmly entrenched in my vision of the animal. How could one not want to own such an animal, especially since we had a building specifically designated as a home for it? To me it seemed irrefutable that a cow shed required a cow. We had the one, and we had been, I became convinced, dispossessed of the other by a hasty and injudicious, not to say foolish, decision of my mother and aunt.

‘We do not have land on which it can graze, nor any way of getting food for it. And neither your aunt nor I wish to milk a cow. It would provide far more milk than we could use, even if we made butter and cheese. It is much easier to let Mr Ahern deal with it and get what milk we need from him.’

‘I could take care of it. Mr Ahern could show me what to do.’

‘You have your studies and other work to do.’ My mother smiled at my aunt over my head.

I found these excuses paltry, although I did not say so aloud. Once I had finished my assigned task of unpacking my few belongings and putting my clothes in the old press and my school supplies on the table in my bedroom, I put on my coat and pulled on my topboots (as we called wellies then). I wandered out the back door and casually inspected the area behind the house. A stone wall about three feet high enclosed an area of fifteen by thirty feet. Most of this eventually became our vegetable garden. A rough stone path led to the outdoor bog in the far left-hand corner. The cowshed was in the other corner. It was a dilapidated stone structure open on one side, walled off from the rest of the yard. A wooden gate in the back wall opened onto a small field beyond.

I took care not to appear to be in haste to inspect the cow shed lest I attract my mother’s or aunt’s attention. It took me a good quarter hour to reach that part of the yard, and any observer would have thought me far more interested in the stone wall. Even when I reached the cow shed and looked in, my gaze was perfunctory. The cow shed had been in use until our great-uncle had died a few months earlier. Clearly it was still functional. I knew that cows ate grass, and the field on the other side of the gate had grass. I concluded that all that prevented us from having a cow was my mother’s and my aunt’s misguided assumption that I was incapable of handling ‘our’ cow.

I wandered onto the road and looked around. There was no cow in view, but, I reasoned, as our new house demonstrated, cows were kept in sheds behind houses, and it would be necessary to look behind each house. The houses on the other side of the street were on the ocean side of the village and had no fields behind them. These seemed unlikely candidates for the stabling of a cow. A slow, meandering ten-minute walk took me to the other end of the village. I peered between each pair of houses but found no cow. I walked back the way I came. I pondered if I should ask my mother where Mr Thomas Ahern lived. Would that give the game away? I decided that it might.

I re-entered the area behind our house and unfastened the gate that led into the field. The ground sloped gradually upward away from our house. I climbed to the upper end of the field and sat on the stone wall. From that vantage point, I could see the back sides of all the properties on that side of the road. All of them were much like ours. Outbuildings in various states of decay and disrepair, many of them little more than rough piles of stones fashioned haphazardly into walls. I could see chickens and sheep, but no cow. Clearly Mr Thomas Ahern had not only purloined our cow but also hidden it from view in an attempt to prevent its rightful owner from repossessing it. A hot coal of indignation burned in my soul. I spent the rest of the day plotting schemes to find out where the cow was being kept.

A man came down the road toward the village pushing a barrow holding several pails. He stopped in front of our house. I could hear my aunt and the man talking. After a few minutes he continued on. An hour or so later, my mother called me into the house for tea. Those first few days in Munfrees, our meals were rather simple because of a lack of supplies. It would take another week or so for my aunt and mother to get the housekeeping organised. Our tea that evening consisted of potatoes and bread and jam.

The table held one surprise. The cup that my mother set in front of me held milky tea. We hadn’t had milk for our breakfast tea. Somehow during the day by means unbeknownst to me milk had made an appearance in our house. ‘Where did this milk . . . How . . . ?’ My suspicions made me incoherent, all the more so because I had to suppress it lest my schemes be revealed.

‘Uncle Thomas brought it by a while ago. Did you not see him?’ My aunt placidly spread jam on a slice of bread, either unaware of her treachery or dissembling her own part in the plot. She was consorting with the enemy, trafficking in stolen goods. And Mr Thomas Ahern had become Uncle Thomas. The man had suborned the affections of my aunt and mother. (He was in fact a relative of ours. Determining the exact nature of relationships in the village would have challenged the most astute genealogist, however. We settled for calling members of the previous generation ‘uncle’ or ‘aunt’; members of the same generation referred to one another as ‘cousin’.)

The recovery of our cow would require more cunning than I had anticipated. But I now knew one fact I hadn’t known before. The Ahern man had approached the village from the road that extended southward along the coast to the main fields. The pails on his cart had held milk, and therefore the cow was not in the village but was being held prisoner somewhere outside it.

I had been awoken at daybreak that morning by men talking as they walked past our house on their way to the fields. I realised that I would not be allowed out that early. My mother would insist that I eat and complete my studies first. I could, however, watch them to make sure that Ahern was among them and then follow them later. The geography of Munfrees worked in my favour. There was no avenue of escape. And besides I had done nothing—yet—to put Ahern on guard. He would have no reason to suspect me.

I rose early the next morning and sat at the table beside the window. I had a book propped open in front of me, and in the guise of a young scholar I watched for my quarry. Several people passed down the road in the right direction. I discounted the women, since I knew that Ahern was male. One man carried shopping bags and was, I surmised, headed toward the N54 to catch the bus into Killybegs. That left a half-dozen possibles. My aunt and then a bit later my mother came down the stairs and greeted me as they passed the door. I hoped they were pleased to see me at my studies so early. Soon I heard the sounds of our morning meal being prepared, and I was called away from my observation post shortly, without catching sight of Ahern.

There was milk for our breakfast that morning. I asked innocently whether Mr Ahern had made a delivery that morning and was told that it was left over from the previous evening, that he would bring milk only once a day. ‘So cows give milk in the afternoon?’

‘I think they are milked twice a day.’ My mother queried my aunt with a look.

My aunt was uncertain. ‘I believe so.’ She smiled at me. ‘You can ask Uncle Thomas this afternoon.’

The subject had been broached, with little prompting from myself. I had, in my eyes, been given permission to investigate the matter and was emboldened to interrogate them further. ‘Where does Mr Ahern (I refused to admit kinship to the robber) keep our cow?’

‘He has a field somewhere toward the end of the valley.’ My mother inclined her head southward. ‘He is grazing it there.’

Success! I had the information I needed. I helped with the washing up and then did my assigned lessons for the day. Around mid-day, I presented myself to my aunt and mother to be quizzed on that day’s readings. After acquitting myself admirably (the recovery of our cow was not to be risked by failure and an afternoon devoted to review of what I had neglected to learn in the morning), I was given permission to spend the rest of the day outside. I even asked if I could follow the path southward to the end of the valley and was told that I could but not to venture too close to the water.

The road through the village turns eastward a hundred or so yards outside our house and ascends the hill to the outside world. South of the turning, the road degenerates quickly to a path following the shoreline, bordered on the landward side by stone fences and the seaward side by rocky outcroppings. There are many muddy patches where water seeps down from the hills, and I soon learned that I could make faster progress by walking closer to the walls, where the ground was covered with stones.

Many things caught my attention, and I noted them for later investigation. That day I had a mission. I was just tall enough to see over the walls, and I examined each field as I passed it. There were fields filled with plants; there were fields with sheep, some of whom paused in their activities to regard me as closely as I was regarding them; there was even a pig in one field. There were dogs guarding the sheep. There were men engaged in what to me were still inexplicable activities. I was stopped by one of them who asked me if I was Mrs Brennan’s boy. I told him that I was. He nodded and then went back to work, curiosity apparently satisfied.

And finally there was the field with the cow. She (it is a measure of my ignorance that I initially thought of the cow as a he) was standing twenty or so feet away from the fence and eating grass. As I watched, she bent down and tore off a mouthful and then used her pinkish-grey tongue to manoeuvre the grass into her mouth.

My immediate reaction was disgust. The cow bore no resemblance to the sleek animals I had seen in pictures and drawings. Her back sagged between bony shoulders and hipbones. Her flesh drooped, appearing to be only loosely attached to the bones. And she was filthy, her legs covered with mud up to the knee joints, her tail a dirty flail. Then there was the business of the udder hanging forward of her back legs, a curious, quivering appendage with no claim to ascetic value. The cow was, not to put too fine a point on it, ugly. She turned my way and regarded me without interest. I watched her for another quarter hour. She continued to eat. The animal had no sense of the drama, no sense of the potential magic of cowness.

I turned away in disappointment and continued down the path to its end. I found many more rewarding things to occupy my attention. Had an informant been available, I would have pestered him or her with questions about the nature of the things I was encountering. Several hours later, I returned along the path. As I approached the field with the cow, a man pushing a barrow came towards me and opened the gate to the field. He was, I concluded, the elusive Thomas Ahern.

When I came abreast of the field, I stopped and watched him over the fence. He attached a rope halter to the cow’s head and led it toward towards a stake in the ground that I had overlooked before. He tied the other end of the rope to the stake and then took a three-legged stool and several pails from the barrow. At that point he noticed me and waved. ‘Are you the Brennan boy then? I’m your Uncle Thomas. Come in and keep me company while I’m milking.’

I pushed the gate open and walked over to him. There was a smell, a smell that grew stronger the closer I came to the cow. Uncle Thomas sat down next to the cow and placed a pail underneath her udder. He pressed his head against her belly and then began milking. He puts his hands around two of the teats and began pulling on them. With each stroke, a jet of milk squirted into the pail. At first, when the pail was empty, there was a sound of milk hitting metal with a clang. As the pail filled, the sound changed and became liquid hitting liquid. I craned my neck and looked into the pail.

The cow continued to graze, ignoring both of us as Uncle Thomas asked me questions about our life in Dublin. Occasionally the cow would move about, and Uncle Thomas would interrupt himself to coo ‘Cush, cush, stand still, girlie,’ at the cow. When the first pail was full, he handed it to me and asked me to carry it over to the barrow. I took that opportunity to examine the milk. It was foamy and bits and pieces of grass floated on the surface. It also smelled unpleasantly of cow.

When I returned, Uncle Thomas asked me if I would like to try milking the cow. I didn’t really want to, but he seemed to expect me to try. So I sat down and modelled myself on him. I pressed my head against the cow’s belly as I had seen him do. I placed my hands on two of the teats. They were unexpectedly warm and rubbery. I yanked on them. Nothing came out. The cow, however, turned her head around and looked askance at me. As I pulled at the teats again, in another vain attempt to produce a stream of milk, she swatted her tail across my face, leaving a slimy trail of muck on my cheek.

I jumped up, tipping the stool over and falling backward onto the ground. Uncle Thomas guffawed and helped me up. I stepped away, out of the reach of the cow’s tail. I pulled my handkerchief from my pocket and anxiously scrubbed at my face. I thought I would never be clean again. The handkerchief quickly became soiled, and I threw it away in disgust.

‘That’s just a love tap, lad. Nothing to worry about. Now, try again.’ Uncle Thomas picked the stool up and sat it back in place. ‘Here. Let me show you.’

He put a hand on my shoulder and pushed me back beside the cow. He knelt down and showed me how to form a circle with my thumb and other fingers and then slide them gently down the teat. This time my efforts were rewarded. I soon mastered the particular rhythm of milking. I wasn’t quite as fast as Uncle Thomas, but I did manage to fill a pail.

On the way back, an older man joined us in walking back to the village. Uncle Thomas related my experience. The man laughed and told a story about his first attempt to milk a cow. He had been kicked for his troubles. His story turned my experience into a common happening. I was part of a band of fellow sufferers. The beasts were not to be trusted. They inflicted similar insults on everyone. When we reached our house, Uncle Thomas gave my mother the pail of milk I had produced and told her that I had the makings of a fine cowman in me. As soon as the door closed and Uncle Thomas moved off, my mother gave me a basin of water, a bar of soap, and a cloth and ordered me to scrub myself clean.

That evening when we sat down to tea, my aunt lifted the pitcher and began filling the cups halfway with milk. I told her that I would henceforth take my tea without milk. The knowledge of where milk came from—it was hardly the gift I had imagined—had turned it into poison for me. I was told not to be silly. A growing boy needed milk. I let the tea get cold in the hope that I would be able to dump it out later when no one was looking. I finally drank it under duress.

It is a wonder that any of us survived. Life in Munfrees was unsanitary. Dirt, and the germs that went with it, was ubiquitous. It soon ceased to bother me, and my mother even allowed me to have a grimy face and hands on occasion. I don’t recall having more than the usual run of childhood diseases. Perhaps my memories are not accurate.

But, then, memories such as these are composed of equal parts of remembrance and forgetting. My stories of Munfrees, polished over countless retellings, are romances in the original sense of that term. The dirt and the smells, the stultifying poverty, the wresting of a livelihood from the recalcitrant soil—those disappear in my stories. One forgets, I forget, the worse aspects of that life.

Certainly the child that I was then did not express himself, did not even think, in the vocabulary and concepts that I use to tell these stories. But are these stories any less valid because they are fictional, because they are told with an adult’s sensibilities? Are imagined recollections less real than true ones? All these memories are what I am, they are part of what I have become. I am a teller of tales, and fiction is a way of truthsaying.

Danny

The Island, Tabulae mundi mihi

Danny

(c) 2010

The night that Danny died I arrived home very late from a dinner party. I had enjoyed the evening. Consequently I stayed longer than I usually do at parties, and it was well after midnight when I and the other stragglers left. We even extended the evening a bit by chatting as we waited for taxis. As often happens when I overindulge, I began deflating as soon as I got in the cab. I nodded off within a minute or two and awoke only when the taxi driver reached my street and asked where to let me off. I was still half-asleep when I stumbled into my house, but before I could go to bed, I had to check my email. My father was in hospital at the time. My sister was with him, and she sent an update on his condition every evening after visiting him. So I logged onto the internet and opened the browser, and there in the headlines on the home page was ‘Danny found dead in London flat’.


I felt as if I had been clubbed. I couldn’t bring myself to click on the link and read the report. The details had no importance next to the stark fact of his death. I sat there staring at the screen and crying, all need for sleep gone.

It is a measure of his fame that no surname was needed. Just Danny. I became so used to thinking of him by his first name alone that I had to make an effort to recall his last name. It wasn’t until later, when I read the obituaries, that I learned his full name, as well as a great many other facts about him, for the first time. But then our friendship hadn’t depend on knowing the particulars of each other’s life.

His death occasioned the usual display of grief. Statements of ‘our great loss’ poured forth from his colleagues and others in the public sphere, with the usual exaggerations of the deceased’s talents and qualities. Many of those commenting on his death knew him well; others were simply taking advantage of his death to appear on television or in the papers. The church was crowded for the funeral mass, and mourners lined the route of the funeral cortège ten deep.

Danny would have been gratified, I think, that his last appearance played to standing-room-only crowds. He loved performing. You can see that in every videotaped record. On stage, Danny became an exaltation of larks. He was always in motion, making eye contact with the crowds, involving them, making the performance a communal celebration. He told me once that the adulation and the applause were the only drugs he needed, but that he had become addicted to them.

I suppose others found our friendship inexplicable. I’m not sure that I understand it myself. He was already famous when we met, but he and I lived in such different worlds that I didn’t recognise his name when Lynne Megorie introduced us. Both of us were guests at a party at her house in Golders Green. A couple had approached me, introduced themselves, and began talking about one of my books. I was only half-attending to what they were saying, making polite murmurs of response as my eyes roamed the other guests looking for someone interesting.

Lynne came up to our group and interrupted them. She asked them to excuse us and then led me away. ‘There’s someone here who wants to meet you. I think you will like him.’

She guided me to a relatively empty spot in the room and then beckoned toward a cluster of people. A young man detached himself from that group and walked toward us. I knew that I had seen the face before. It wasn’t someone I had met, but someone who was familiar from the papers or the television. ‘Ross, this is Danny Ahern. He asked me especially to introduce the two of you.’

I shook hands with Danny. Again the name was familiar, and I felt that this was someone I should be able to identify, but nothing came to me. My face must have betrayed my bewilderment, because Lynne laughed and said, ‘You’ll have to forgive Ross, Danny. He doesn’t follow popular music. Now if you sang opera, he would know all about you.’

Then I remembered why I knew the name and the face. Lynne’s mention of popular music provided the key.

‘Even I in my cloistered cell have heard of Mr Ahern, Lynne.’ And then I said something rude. ‘I’m just astonished that he has heard of me.’ I hope that Danny took that remark as an attempt at modesty on my part. In truth, I was betraying my assumption that a rock star, which is how I thought of him, was incapable of reading or, if he were by some fluke literate, would read my works. I was certain of the superiority of my education, my background, my artistry, my taste. If Danny understood what I was really saying, he had the self-confidence and self-control not to reveal that he did.

‘I’ve read all your works, including your recent series on Munfrees. My ma has been cutting them from the Times [he was referring to the Irish Times] and sending them to me. She knows that I’m interested in Munfrees. My grandparents, my father’s parents, come from Munfrees. In fact, my grandmother was born there.’

‘Oh, you’re one of those Aherns. I hadn’t realised. We must be related in a dozen ways.’

‘A dozen ways?’ Lynne has very expressive eyebrows. They arched in amusement. ‘It sounds almost incestuous.’

Before I could answer her, Danny said, ‘It is a very small village in an unpopulated area. Everyone is related to everyone else. In fact, everyone is usually his own second cousin on his mother’s side and his first cousin once removed on his father’s side.’ He spoke very softly but with a great deal of resonance. The accent was pure Dublin, but I found his vocabulary and phrasing unexpectedly educated. My reaction was instinctive. His way of speaking as well as his family’s origins in Munfrees made me think more highly of him.

‘Have you ever been there?’

‘No. I’ve just heard my gran telling stories about it. I gave a concert in Sligo once, and I thought about taking a few hours to drive up to see it, but in the end, I decided . . . ,’ he paused as if searching for the exact words to express his feelings. ‘I guess I was worried that it wouldn’t be what I expected. My gran’s family left when she was eight or nine to go to Dublin—that would have been in the late 1930s—and she remembers Munfrees as this marvellous place full of light and wonderful things. She’s always telling stories about how miserable Dublin is in comparison.’

‘Has she ever gone back?’

At that point, Lynne decided that she had fulfilled her duties as hostess. She stopped a passing waiter and provided us with full glasses of wine and then moved on to talk with another knot of guests.

‘No. She went on a pilgrimage to Knock a few years ago with some friends, and she tried to persuade them to drive to Munfrees, but they weren’t having any of that.’

‘She probably wouldn’t recognise it as the place she left. It’s much more prosperous now, but still in comparison to life here it’s primitive. But when we went there in the early 1950s, it was hideously poor and remote. In the 1930s it must have been even worse. I’ve always wondered if life in Munfrees changed between the middle ages and the early 1900s.’

He nodded. ‘May I ask a question?’ His posture became diffident. My impression was that he wanted to broach a subject but was unsure of my reaction to it.

‘Of course. Please.’ I was growing to have a better opinion of him. As you undoubtedly know from pictures, he was an attractive man. The music videos hint at the force of his personality. Still, he was performing when those were made, and his stage persona is on display there. A better clue to his character can be found in interviews. He was immensely likeable and that comes across in his chat show appearances. He was funny and quick, filled with good will and bonhomie. Charm, he had charm. It was the rare interview that didn’t end with everyone laughing. In private, he was less expansive, less con brio, but more introspective and less concerned about being entertaining. He had a talent for making others feel relaxed and at ease. I think it was because he was so accepting of others. He saw similarities where others might see differences, and what differences he did find intrigued rather than alarmed or repelled him.

‘In all your reminiscences of people in Munfrees, they always tell stories. Please don’t be offended, but I’m curious. Is that realistic? Or do you put that in to make them interesting?’

‘No. That was the one thing they had in abundance. Stories. Perhaps the stories made up for what they didn’t have. They were the ones—well, they and my mother and aunt—who taught me how to tell a story. Really, I suppose they were the ones who made storytelling seem a natural part of life.’

‘My gran tells stories like that.’

‘Now you have intrigued me. Does she have any about Munfrees? Or was she too young to remember it when she left?’

‘She has several. There’s one that I think that’s her favourite.’

‘I’d like to hear it. Can you tell it to me?’

Danny motioned toward a vacant window seat. The space was a bit too narrow for two full-grown men, but we both used our legs to hold the curtains aside.

‘She was walking by the shore one day picking up driftwood for the fire. Is the beach there sandy?’

‘Most of it is rocks—layers of tilted shale slabs running down into the ocean. But there are a few small coves that have sand.’

‘Well, she says that she was standing on a sandy beach. She saw a round box floating in the water fifteen–twenty feet out. Each wave pushed it closer to the shore. Finally it was close enough that she could step into the water and retrieve it. It was very light in weight, and there was a cord across the top whose ends were attached to the box. She picked it up by the cord and carried it up on the beach. The box was covered with brightly printed paper. She says that it was like wallpaper, but that she didn’t know that at the time. She first saw wallpaper after they went to Dublin. The paper covering was badly stained by seawater, and it fell off when the box dried out. There was a lid and she lifted that off. Inside was a hat. A broad-brimmed woman’s hat swathed in pink gauze, with a red velvet ribbon around the base of the crown. In the front there was a dark red silk rose surrounded by feathers.’

‘How odd. It must have come from some ship, but no passenger liner would have been that far north. I can’t imagine the box would have lasted long in the water.’

‘It’s made of very thin wood. And the hat weighs almost nothing. As long as the seas were calm, it would have floated.’

‘You mean they still exist?’

‘Yes. My gran still has them.’

‘And the hat?’

‘It’s very old now and fragile. She’s kept it all these years. It’s the one thing from her childhood that she still owns.’

‘It must have seemed unreal to everyone at the time.’

Danny looked around. The party had reached the stage when drink had loosened tongues, and people were laughing and conversing loudly. ‘As unreal as this would have seemed to me ten years ago. I never imagined I would be asked to parties like this. I dreamed about it. I thought that it was one sign of success, but I didn’t ever expect to be asked to one. But at least I knew that there were parties like this. For my gran, the hat was an alien artefact. It came from another world. She never suspected that such things might exist. I think that’s why she kept it—it was a reminder of what was out there to be had and what she hadn’t had when she was young. She showed it to everyone in Munfrees and asked what it was. It was explained to her that rich ladies wore such hats. When she said that then she wanted to be a rich lady and wear a hat like that, everyone laughed and told her not to be foolish.’

‘And does she wear hats like that?’

‘She usually wears scarves, but she’s always had two or three “fancy” hats. That’s her one treat. When I got my first royalty check, I bought her the biggest, frothiest, maddest hat I could find, and I had the shop put it in the brightest hat box they had and took it to her. She laughed when she opened it and said I was foolish to spend money on such things. But she was happy that I had done so. I don’t think she’s ever worn it outside the house, but she shows it to her friends sometimes.’

He paused. I think his mind was far away at that point, and for him the crowd around us had disappeared. I took advantage of his inattention to examine him. Seen up close, it was apparent that money and thought had gone into his grooming. He had a good tailor, and his hair had that artful disarray that only a good hairdresser can achieve. Whatever his equivalent of a ‘rich lady’s hat’ might be, it was obviously now within his means. I suppose the same can be said of me.

When he became aware of my scrutiny, he turned back toward me and met my gaze with an equally frank appraisal. ‘Would you like to see the hat? If we’re both in Dublin at the same time, I’ll get it from my gran and show it to you.’

‘I’d like that very much.’ I gave him my card with my Dublin address and phone number. When he handed me his card in exchange, other people took that as a signal that our conversation had ended and moved in to claim our attention. I did not speak with him further that night.

The story stuck with me, however. I couldn’t use it verbatim since it wasn’t really mine, but in altered versions the random intrusion of a strange object into a character’s life figures in two of my works. A life-changing meeting with something, some object that is trivial in itself, from outside the character’s normal world is a useful plot device. I even have in mind a story about a character who finds such an object and remains unchanged.

I didn’t expect Danny to contact me. Our exchange of cards had seemed one of those polite rituals. Two weeks later, however, I received a call from him. He was in Dublin and had the hatbox to show me. Could he drop by? I invited him to lunch. As soon as I rang off, my publisher called. Four pages from my latest manuscript were missing. Would I email my editor a file with the missing pages? Since the page numbers on my screen didn’t match those in the manuscript copy, I had to spend some time finding the passage in question and saving a copy to a new file. I should have stopped at that point and emailed the file to my editor, but I decided to check for errors. I found several things that needed rewriting, and I had to compare several of the changes against what I could recall having said before and after the insertions to make sure that I wasn’t introducing inconsistencies. I quickly became engrossed in revising.

When the doorbell rang, I cursed the interruption. I stomped down the stairs, not in the best of moods. It wasn’t until I pulled the door open ready to be irritated and saw Danny that I remembered that I had invited him to lunch. With one hand, he held a large cardboard box, with the top flaps folded down, against his body. In the other hand was a bottle of wine. He handed the bottle to me and said, ‘I didn’t know what you were planning for lunch, but I brought a bottle of Mosel. If it doesn’t suit, just save it for later.’ He was clearly very happy about something, almost festive, and in a mood for celebrating.

‘It will be too good for what I’m making. It’s such a wet day, and since Munfrees is the cause of this meeting, I thought I would make a staple of the village—potato soup.’ I gave myself credit for quick thinking. My original thought had been to buy takeaway at the market, but there wasn’t time for that now. ‘Come in. Come in. Sit the box anywhere. Let me take your coat.’ As I closed the door, I saw one of the neighbourhood teenagers standing on the pavement peeking out from under her umbrella. Her mouth was agape, and her lips silently formed the word ‘Danny’.

‘Oh, that will be perfect. It’s one of my favourites.’

I led him through to the kitchen and sat him at one end of the work table and poured us both a glass of his wine. I took some bacon from the fridge and set an onion and some potatoes on the table. I sliced the bacon I needed and chopped the onion and put them in water to boil. When I turned around from the stove, I found Danny peeling the potatoes.

‘Oh, you shouldn’t be doing that.’

‘I like doing it. I used to do it at home. There were so many of us that we had to help. I often did the cooking after school.’

I took a sip of the wine. ‘This is good. Are you celebrating something?’

‘I could say that I am celebrating being in your home and peeling your potatoes, but in truth I just received word this morning that my latest single is number 1 on the UK and Ireland charts.’

‘I must buy a copy.’

‘Don’t do that. I’ll sing it for you.’ He picked up another potato. ‘Now you’ll have to imagine a keyboard, two guitars, and a set of drums in the background.’

He sang in his high clear voice, occasionally miming the playing of the various instruments. All the while he continued to peel the potatoes. Both of us were laughing when he finished.

‘Considering what you must usually be paid to perform, those must be the most expensive potato peels in history.’

One good feature of my kitchen is the number of windows. I’ve allowed the shrubberies to grow so that they cover most of the glass. The light is filtered and rather green, but the kitchen is bright but not glaring.

‘I like this room,’ he said in response. ‘It’s very comfortable.’ He gathered the peelings. ‘Where’s the bin?’

That afternoon was the start of our friendship. We ate the soup sitting at the kitchen table and talked about our work. His explanation of how he wrote a song struck a chord with me. There were many similarities between his methods and my writing habits. We ended with a discussion of the serendipitous nature of inspiration and the unlikely places it surfaces.

It was late afternoon before we remembered the cause of the visit. He went out into the hallway and brought back the box and set it on the kitchen table. He folded back the flaps. ‘The hatbox is so fragile now that I don’t want to lift it out. I’ll just take the lid off.’

Inside the box was a dusty hat. It looked delicate, as if a breath would cause it to crumble. Even in its decayed shape it was easy to see that it must once have been beautiful.

‘I asked my grandmother what she thought the first time she saw it. She said she thought it was magic. Everyone in Munfrees believed in magic, she said, even the priest, and to her this was just another magic event. Not magic like stage magic tricks, but real magic. I mean . . .’

‘You don’t have to explain. I have lived with Munfrees’ magic all my life. I think of it as grace. An unexpected irruption of wonders and marvels and kindness into the everyday.’

We left it at that. He closed the box, and we walked into the hall. As he was putting on his coat, he asked. ‘May I come again?’

I nodded and smiled in delight. ‘I hope you will.’

When I held the door open for him, we discovered a crowd waiting at the bottom of the steps. Every young person in the neighbourhood appeared to be there. There was a collective intake of breath. Danny let out a whoop of pleasure and bounded down the stairs. ‘Mind the box. Just let me put it in my car first and then we can talk.’ He was suddenly ten years younger than the person who had been sitting in my kitchen for the past three hours.

That was one of the things that has impressed me about all the posthumous comments. Everyone seems to have known a slightly different Danny. Certain qualities remained constant. Everyone liked him and treasured his friendship. Even those who met him only briefly, like the teenagers standing outside my house that day, were impressed by his kindness. But he could adapt effortlessly to the company surrounding him. With me he was a serious craftsman, concerned about the quality of his work. With his fans, he was gregarious and open and available.

That was the first of many meetings we had during the decade I knew him. Perhaps five or six times a year, we would meet. We would share a meal and talk. Between those meetings, we might exchange emails. We never spoke of anything important, never solved the world’s problems, never did anything but enjoy our time together. We were simply friends. Grace is the unexpected gift, the magic of the ordinary.

The Cloud Gardener

Tabulae mundi mihi, The Island

The Cloud Gardener

(c) 2010

I first saw the Cloud Gardener in the late autumn hills above Munfrees. I had climbed to my perch high above the valley to survey my kingdom. The sun was warm that day, but an occasional tendril of chilly air hinted at approaching cold. Far out at sea a dark cloud bank sat on the horizon.


Below me, the Ahern brothers were clearing a field that had lain fallow that summer. One of them was wielding a scythe, both hands grasping the handles attached to the long wooden pole, his body flowing with the rhythm of the work. From my vantage point, the work was a sequence of colours. The sun reflected off the blade, and it looked as if a flash of curved light were cleaving the grass. The plants had begun to wither with the swift shortening of the daylight hours. Standing, the tops of the plants were yellow in the sunlight, but when they fell to the ground the colour shifted to brown. It was as if the light drained from them as they were cut. The exposed stubble was still green. The other brother followed a few feet behind and used a long-handled wooden rake to roll the cut grass into mounds. The Aherns’ progress through the field was marked by a growing arc of what from a distance looked like a newly mown lawn striped with rows of faded grass.

The scythe hissed as it sliced through the grass. Occasionally it would hit an exposed stone with a clang. Once the brother with the scythe paused to sharpen it, and the scraping sound of the hone against the blade carried clear over the distance. From time to time, they paused to smoke. Then they would rest their weight on their tools and talk in low voices, emphasizing whatever points they were making by pointing to the sea or toward the remaining uncut grasses. I think they saw the cloud bank out at sea and were worried that the approaching front might bring rain that would make it impossible for them to finish that day.

One of them stopped and walked over to the wall surrounding the field. He unbuttoned his flies and pissed against the wall. The arc of his water glistened in the light. When he finished, he shook himself and buttoned up again. When he rejoined his brother, he made some remark and both men laughed.

After a time, I tired of watching them. Their activities were too repetitious to hold my interest for long. I lay back and watched the sky. It was even less varied than the scene below me, but it was a blank canvas for my imagination. Overhead the sky was clear, but to the west there were high streamers, vapours almost too thin and tenuous to be called clouds, mere suggestions of white threads against the sky. They were evenly spaced as if they had been combed or raked. Perhaps the Aherns’ activities gave me that notion.

It was then that I saw the Cloud Gardener. He was almost invisible, nothing more than light of a different weight. He was dressed much like all the other farmers in the valley—an old cloth cap settled easily on his head, shapeless coat and trousers, a grey collarless shirt, heavy stiff shoes. He bent over and examined the clouds, following them westward to the approaching bank of clouds. He lifted the rake from his shoulders and rolled the cloud bank forward toward us. He worked his way down the row of clouds, moving them steadily toward the shore. There was nothing hurried about his movements. He had all the time in the world, he seemed to imply. If not these clouds, there would be more tomorrow or the next day. The sky was liberal with its clouds. The movements were practiced, familiar.

That night, I wrote the original version of my story of the Cloud Gardener. It was the first time I had written on a subject of my own devising instead of to a theme suggested by my mother or Aunt Alyce as part of my lessons. We had finished our tea, the dishes had been washed and put away, and the cloth folded and set atop the dresser. My mother had pumped the white gas lamp and then lit the mantle. The smell of the sulphur match and the burning mantle lingered in the air, as she put the glass globe in place and adjusted the flame so that it didn’t smoke. The lamp hissed. Candles burn silently, but those lamps hissed.

The three of us sat around the table. I remember clearly that my mother was reading, and Aunt Alyce was writing letters. From time to time, my mother would read aloud a sentence or a phrase that she liked, or Aunt Alyce might ask if my mother wanted to add a note to the letter she was writing. Other than that the only sounds were the turning of a page in my mother’s book, the scratching of Alyce’s pen and my pencil against the paper, the occasional creaking of a chair as we shifted our weight, the rain against the roof, and more distantly the waves breaking against the shore. So many of my memories of Munfrees in those days are aural. It was so quiet there and life so unhurried that even slight sounds occupied more of the air than they do now.

I opened my foolscap tablet and began writing. I had seen my mother and my aunt engage in that activity for as long as I had been alive, and the mechanics of it were familiar to me. I wasn’t allowed to use a pen yet. Fountain pens were still the most common means of writing then, and my mother and aunt probably feared (with justification) the results of any close encounter between myself and ink. I sharpened four or five pencils and set them out in a neat row to my right so that once I began, I would not have to stop to deal with a dull pencil or a broken lead. If my mother or Aunt Alyce found my behaviour surprising, they did not comment upon that in my presence.

That is one of the gifts they gave me—the dignity of allowing me to consider writing as something I might choose to do, or not. They might correct my spelling or my grammar or suggest ideas for me to consider, but they never derided my attempts to write. Nor did they praise them extravagantly. Unless they were assignments in the lessons they taught me, they never asked to see what I had written but waited until I felt my work was ready to be shown to them. They never even once remarked on my decision to use my initials rather than my full name when writing. To this day, I do not know why the young Patrick Ross Brennan transformed himself into another person when he became an author.

The Cloud Gardener

P. R. Brennan

October 21, 1951

The Cloud Gardener lives in an old stone bothy on a high mountain. He takes care of all the clouds. Every morning, after he has his breakfast and his tea, he picks up his rake and goes out to the sky fields to work. Some days he goes west and pulls the rain clouds in from the sea. Some days he pushes the clouds away so that the sun can shine. If a little cloud wanders off and gets lost, he goes after it and brings it back. When a bad cloud comes, he hits it with lightning and thunder and chases it off. Most people can’t see him because he’s invisible so they don’t know he is there and he doesn’t have any friends. That makes him very lonely.

One day, the Cloud Gardener was working near Munfrees helping clouds over the gate in the hills. A boy was climbing a hill to his secret place. Mr Garrity’s dog was with him. The boy was throwing a stick for the dog to catch. The dog is barking because he likes chasing sticks. The Cloud Gardener stopped and watched them. He wanted to join the boy and the dog.

He forgot to watch the clouds, and they began to drift about. Soon they covered up the boy and the dog, and they got lost. The boy couldn’t see the dog, and he called for him to come back but the dog was looking for the stick and he couldn’t find it because the clouds were thick and it was dark.

When the Cloud Gardener saw what had happened, he rushed about pushing the clouds back into place. The dog found the stick and he ran back to the boy, his tail wagging. The boy, who had magic eyes, waved to the Cloud Gardener and called out ‘Thank you.’ The dog also had very good eyes, and he wagged his tail and barked ‘thank you’ to the Cloud Gardener. That made the Cloud Gardener very happy, and he wasn’t lonely any more.

The End

I reread what I had written. I had just been introduced to commas and I added them liberally. I was quite satisfied with my effort. Then I closed the cover of my tablet and put it and the pencils away with my other school supplies. I pulled out the book I had been reading and carried it back to the table to join my mother and Aunt Alyce.

It would be another dozen years before I encountered Yeats’ lines

                                       A lonely impulse of delight
                                        Drove to this tumult in the clouds

There are times that poetry resonates immediately within, and those lines rang in me like a bell.

The Harrowing of Arsonoth

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The Island 2

Tabulae mundi mihi, The Island

The Island 2

Nexis Pas

(c) 2010 by the author

Between the ages of two and seven, when we moved to Munfrees, I lived with Aunt Alyce and my mother in a flat on Bell Street in Dublin. Until I returned as a university student, the row of shops between the building in which we lived and the primary school I attended was what came to my mind whenever that city was mentioned. Every storefront was a distinct colour—the chemist’s was red, the baker’s a light blue. I suppose the shops may have had names, but they were always referred to in generic terms—the grocer’s, the butcher’s, the chipper—there was only one of each and no further distinction was necessary within the neighbourhood.

That section of the street was always in motion. In the early morning, deliverymen bringing supplies to the shops shouted at one another and at passing schoolboys to get out the way. Later, in the afternoon, it was crowded with shoppers, some of them moving purposefully, other dawdling to look in shop windows or stopping to talk with friends. For the small boy that I was, both the deliverymen and the shoppers were props in a game whose purpose was to move as quickly as possible around them without running into anyone or anything.

The morning trip provided more of interest. I could almost predict what we would have for our evening meal by examining the greengrocer’s long, narrow cart. Most mornings it was parked outside his shop, laden with boxes and baskets of pale green cabbages, darker kale, and white turnips, along with the burlap sacks exuding the earthy smell of potatoes and the sharper scent of onions, waiting to be carried into the store. Carrots often provided the only bright colour.

Usually the offerings on display were the same monotonous dozen or so items. Many fruits and vegetables that we now take for granted were rare treats then, to be had for only a few weeks each year. Whenever oranges were available, the shopkeeper would make a pyramid of them in the window to announce that fact. Every time I saw that, the hope would grow that Aunt Alyce had bought us one for our tea, and that when I arrived home, an orange would be sitting on a plate in the centre of the table. One orange was enough to perfume our small flat. When the time came, Alyce would peel it carefully, her long fingers becoming stained white. She would set the orange back on the plate while she carried the peel away and washed her hands. Then would come the magic moment when she divided it into segments and placed them on our plates. A gift of sunshine, she once called them. She and my mother wove a tale of a grove of orange trees in Portugal and its keeper, an old man who gathered sunlight and put it inside the fruit until each one became radiant with colour, and of a speedy ship, its sails taut with wind and its hold filled with chests of glowing light, that brought the fruit across the sea to Dublin.

Left to my own devices, I was fonder of gore. My favourite morning sight was the unloading of carcasses at the butcher’s. I wasn’t supposed to tarry on the way to school, but I always found an excuse for stopping to watch—a shoe that needed retying or a search through my satchel to make sure that I hadn’t forgotten a pencil. The delivery van stood open while the butcher examined the bodies of pigs and sheep and the sides of beef hanging from hooks fixed to the roof of the van. The butcher and the driver would argue over prices, while the butcher’s boy in his blood-stained smock waited stoically for the moment his boss would motion him forward to carry one of the bloody slabs of meat into the shop. I loved the fluid motion with which the man detached one of the carcasses from the hooks and shouldered it even as he hopped down from the van to the street, his face barely registering his exertions. I hoped one day to be able to duplicate that impressive feat of strength. Later, the head of the pig or the sheep would appear on a tray in the centre of the shop window, surrounded by a ring of sausages. On the few occasions I entered the butcher’s, I didn’t like it, however. The shop oozed a sour, acidic smell.

The walk home was quite different. All the shops were open and their goods spilled out onto the pavement on makeshift shelves and stacks of boxes. But, in contrast to the morning, the goods had become tamed--everyday commodities beyond my reach rather than exotics encountered unexpectedly and offered for free to my view. I had no money and seemingly no hope of ever having any, but I liked to look and to contemplate buying. I picked my imaginary purchases carefully. No one got more value for a pence than I.

My memories of the school are much more indistinct. I remember the excitement of learning to read, but I recall little of the classroom in which I first discovered that the marks on the pages of books could be deciphered and then combined to make other words. The teacher is now only a blur in my mind. She has neither personality nor a name in my memory.

I have stronger memories of our flat on Bell Street. It consisted of two rooms. A toilet and bathroom across the hall were shared with the other flat on the same floor. The front room overlooked the street. It functioned as our sitting room, kitchen, and my bedroom. A gas ring, a sink, and a cupboard in one corner were the kitchen. There was a large circular table in the middle of the room. My mother and Aunt Alyce wrote their books at it, composing and revising the drafts on tablets of paper and then typing the final versions to be sent to the publishers. Later in the day, it would become the table at which they prepared our meal, and still later, the table at which we ate. I did my schoolwork there in the evening, while my mother and aunt read or wrote or talked. A couch beside the window overlooking the street became my bed at night. Blankets and a pillow would be taken from a wardrobe and unfolded. A curtain hung from a rope was pulled across that section of the room when I went to bed. I went to sleep each night listening to the sound of pages being turned in books or to the scratching of pens on paper or the occasional murmured comment. Often noises on the street would wake me in the middle of the night. I would noiselessly raise myself from my makeshift bed and pull back the curtains and watch the neighbourhood.

The inner room was my mother and aunt’s bedroom. I seldom went into it. I don’t recall that there was a specific prohibition against entering it, but the door to it was usually closed. It was always closed at night.

My mother was named Kathryn Brennan. I had been christened Patrick Ross Stephen Michael Brennan and was always called Patrick. Aunt Alyce was Alyce Collins, my mother’s older sister. As far as I knew at the time, I had no other family. My mother was twenty-eight and my aunt thirty-one when we left Dublin for Munfrees.

My mother and Aunt Alyce were writers, mostly of fiction but also of the occasional essay for the papers or magazines. I don’t know if they earned enough then from their writing to support us. We certainly weren’t rich, but there were many far poorer than we were. I would learn later that my mother and aunt received money from their family, and that may have paid for my school fees and other expenses. They also owned a car and knew how to drive it, at a time when it was still uncommon in Ireland for a woman to do so.

*****

“Because your mother needs a place where she can work. There is too much noise here.” Alyce continued packing. When I had arrived home from school, she was filling a suitcase with my clothes. As she picked each piece up, she folded it into a neat square or rectangle before putting it in the suitcase. “We’re leaving tomorrow morning. We now own a house in a village called Munfrees. It belonged to a great-uncle of ours. He died and now it’s ours. Munfrees is in Donegal, along the north-western coast, north of Sligo. I’ll show you where it is on a map as soon as I finish packing. You’ve never been to such a place before. It will be an adventure for you.”

“But school won’t be finished for another month. Why are we leaving now?”

“You have your books. You can read the lessons on your own. If there’s something you don’t understand, your mother and I will teach you.”

“But I don’t want to go. I like it here.”

“Patrick, you must not be selfish. Munfrees will be good for your mother. It will be a much healthier place for all of us, and it will give her the quiet she needs to work.”

“And what about our things? We can’t take the table and our beds in the car.”

“We don’t need them now. We have sold them. A man will be by to pick them up in the morning. We have what we need in Munfrees. Now, gather all your books and paper and put them in that box.”

I had a strong sense of unease that evening. My mother pointed out Munfrees on the map and showed me the route we would take. I had no concept of the distance involved. I had seen a map of Ireland before, of course, but I had spent most of life, at least the years that I could remember, on Bell Street and its environs. We occasionally journeyed to other parts of Dublin, to visit a doctor perhaps, but those trips were rare. I could probably name the counties of Ireland and locate them on a map. We had a globe at school, and I had learned to identify the major countries. I had seen pictures of other parts of Ireland and of the world. But those were things I experienced in books. For me, those things had the same status as the “stories” I read in books. I didn’t distinguish “fact” from “fiction”, indeed wasn’t even aware that there was a distinction to be made.

Of course, as I write this, I am an adult attempting to reconstruct feelings that I had close to sixty years ago. I certainly did not express myself in the vocabulary I am using here, and my thoughts were surely less organized than I am presenting them now. But in 1950, I had never seen television, never seen a film. I had no reason to think that my world would ever be other than the one I knew. Elsewhere and other lives were abstractions I knew from books, not from experience.

The flat on Bell Street was undoubtedly rented, but to me it was my immutable home. The concept that we might leave it and move had never crossed my mind. Similarly, I was unacquainted with the idea that one might dispossess oneself of furniture and acquire other pieces to replace them. The entire enterprise of moving was foreign to me, and I spent a restless night trying to understand it.

Early the next morning, Alyce drove the car around, and mother and she loaded it. While they were doing so, the removal men came for the furniture. Slowly our flat was emptied until only I remained in it, sitting out of the way on the windowsill. Alyce and mother borrowed a broom and a dustpan from the neighbours and swept out. They made one final check to make sure nothing had been left behind. I was left alone in the flat for a moment, while mother and Alyce said good-bye to the neighbours. It was silent. The hooks for the curtain that had cordoned off my bed were the only evidence that we had lived there.

Mother came for me. When I stepped outside, she pulled the door shut and locked it, and then gave the key to the neighbour. We walked down the stairs one final time. When we reached the car, she tilted the front passenger seat forward to allow me to get into the back seat. Then she settled herself in and shut the door. She and Alyce smiled at each other, and then Alyce started the car.

As we drove off, I saw a boy wearing the uniform of the school I attended. I didn’t know him, but seeing him made me aware that I was still wearing my uniform and that I wasn’t headed for school. Alyce had packed all my other clothes, and I literally had nothing but the clothes I had been wearing the previous day. My last memory of our former street was staring at my bony white knees emerging between the grey shorts of my school uniform and the grey knee-length socks. I was wearing the jacket with its school emblem over my heart and the striped cap on my head. The tie was still knotted around my neck. I didn’t know where we were headed, but it seemed clear to me that the tie and cap had become superfluous. I unknotted it and folded it carefully into a neat small bundle and sat it beside me on the seat. I took off my cap. When I looked up again, we were headed down an unfamiliar street.

Today it would take around three hours, more if traffic were heavy, to drive from the area of Bell Street in Dublin to Sligo. The distance is about 220 km, roughly 140 miles. But, of course, now most of the distance is over motorways or dual carriageways. In 1950, the road had only one lane in each direction. It traversed the centre of every town and village rather than skirting them. Especially in the countryside, farm vehicles often slowed traffic to a crawl. We stopped and ate our noon meal in a café, and we did not reach Sligo until mid-afternoon.

Mother gave me a map so that I could trace our journey by ticking off the town names as we passed through them. I tried to keep track of them, but the scenery held too much that was new to me. I had never seen open countryside before, and the expanse of greenery organized by fences and hedgerows into neat parcels astonished me, as did sheep, cows, goats, chickens, ducks, geese. Moreover, I had never eaten in a café before. The idea that I could choose what I would eat was a novelty.

If the journey from Dublin to Sligo was slow, the forty miles from Sligo to Munfrees were even slower. The road was primitive even by the standards of the 1950s. About thirty miles north of Sligo, we turned off the (badly) paved highway for the road to Munfrees. It was gravelled but there were large patches of wet ground that had to be driven slowly. We came over the crest of the hill above Munfrees and began our descent into the village just as the sun was setting. That was my first view of the Atlantic—a red sun disappearing into the ocean. I was so intent on that sight that I didn’t even notice the village until we drove into it and the houses abruptly shut off my view of the ocean.

Quinn

Quinn

Nexis Pas

© 2010 by the author

The man’s gaze lingered on Owen. He had stopped suddenly on the busy pavement, forcing the office workers streaming out of the nearby buildings to part and walk around him. Several of them glanced in Owen’s direction to see what had attracted the man’s attention. Owen shifted uneasily in the queue and looked down the street to see if the bus was coming. He hoped no one he knew was witnessing the encounter. Owen tried not to look, but his eyes kept shifting toward the man to see if he was still staring. The man wasn’t half-bad looking, Owen decided. Not good enough to go with, but not bad. Certainly presentable enough to make his desire for Owen worth having. The man’s mouth opened slightly, and the tip of his tongue flickered over his lips. He kept his eyes on Owen’s face, willing Owen to make contact, to admit that Owen was as interested in him as he was in Owen.

The man was rocking back and forth on his feet now, his hand smoothing his tie against his chest. He glanced around at the flow of pedestrians as if looking for an opening so that he could close the gap separating him from Owen. He tilted his chin slightly and jerked it in the direction he had been headed when he stopped to look at Owen, inviting Owen to join him. Now he expects me to proposition him, thought Owen. He’s already in mid-fantasy about me, some fantasy about my wanting him. Owen grew suddenly disgusted with the encounter and pointedly turned around, breaking contact with the man.

That happened so often now. Owen would become aware that someone, usually a man, was staring at him. He had been the focus of attention before, the looks that darted his way whenever he was in public. They had simply been a recognition of his appearance. He had received such glances since he had been a child and grown used to them. They were so common that he would have noticed them only if he had not received those brief moments of homage. He was handsome, people looked, that was only natural.

But it was different now. His cool stare challenged passersby from larger-than-life-size posters on the walls of bus shelters and the windows of upscale men’s shops, his muscled body escaping total nudity only by the few square inches of cloth hiding his groin, a few square inches that did nothing to hide the fact that he was male. The same images demanded attention from the pages of glossy magazines. There were even montages of his pictures available on websites devoted to the male body, with quite explicit comments detailing what certain viewers wanted from him or wanted to do to him.

Publicly Owen complained about the attention, but occasionally, to himself, he admitted that he liked it. It was after all a form of flattery, even though there were times when it was an inconvenience to be known as the Quinn Man, the model for Quinn’s new line of underwear. The trademark x-shaped white bands highlighting his groin focused the mind on that part of his body—‘X marks the spot,’ one of the photographer’s assistants had remarked to general groans during one of the photo sessions. There were times when he felt the heat of others’ focus on his crotch now, as if they could see the X through his trousers.

When Owen signed the contracts, he had been elated at being chosen. He hadn’t thought much about the consequences of posing for the pictures, of becoming this season’s Quinn Man. He hadn’t anticipated the loss of privacy that the ad campaign would bring. His pictures saturated public spaces, and everyone seemed to have seen them and to recognise him instantly. The slight smile on his lips and the hint of amused self-mockery in his eyes seemed to invite interest and promise accessibility to those who wanted it. Most people assumed they had as much a right to stare at him personally as they had at his picture. Many thought he owed them more, to be as available physically as he was visually. The attention had become even more blatant in the past month, since the second series of pictures had started to appear.

It had seemed a harmless lark at the time. Connor had told him of a photographer—Jimmy—who had hired him and was looking for another young man, someone who was ‘handsome but didn’t look like a model’ for a series of ads for a new line of casual clothes. Owen had gone for an interview on a whim. He was curious to see how the photographer would respond to his looks and if Jimmy would like him well enough to want him to appear in ads. Jimmy did. He offered Owen 200 pounds for a day’s work. Owen signed the release forms without bothering to read them.

Early one sunny Saturday morning, one of Jimmy’s assistants had picked Connor and Owen up in his van. They spent the day being photographed in the grounds of large house in the Kent countryside. Jimmy posed them together and alone. The day was more tedious than Owen had expected. There were long stretches of time when they stood around trying to remain still so that the clothes wouldn’t get wrinkled or disarranged while Jimmy and the others measured distances and checked gauges and settings. These would be followed by frantic minutes of posing while Jimmy snapped hundreds of shots and shouted out directions. ‘Look over my right shoulder.’ ‘Turn your head slightly to the left.’ ‘Lower your chin just a tad.’ But it had been an easy 200 quid.

Owen’s favourite image was one of himself leaning against a tree. He was looking into the camera, his eyes frankly appraising the viewer, a slight smile on his face. The T-shirt he was wearing hugged his body, and it was clear that he was well muscled. What wasn’t apparent in the picture was that the Jimmy’s assistant had pinned the shirt in the back so that it clung to his torso. The pins were scratching his back when the shots in that sequence were taken.

The photographs had appeared online and in print ads. Several people told him that they had seen them. A friend of his mother’s brought them to her attention and she rang wanting to know why he hadn’t let her know beforehand. She would have bought copies of all the papers. Owen asked Jimmy for copies of the photographs to send her but was told that the company whose clothes he was modelling owned the photos and didn’t permit their distribution. It was only then that Owen realised that he no longer controlled his image.

The attention died as quickly as it had flared. Two months later, Jimmy called again and asked if he would model for another series of shots—this time for underwear. The payment was higher this time, 350 pounds for a day’s work. He also had to have his body shaved and then waxed. To his chagrin, the ‘hair sculptor’ left a carefully trimmed patch just above his cock. He also had to spend several hours over the course of a week in a tanning salon getting an all-over tan.

The morning of the shoot, the hair sculptor had given him a touch-up trim. When she had finished, Jimmy and several of his crew, as well as a representative of the manufacturer and people from the ad agency, had come in and inspected the results. They discussed his body dispassionately as if it were no more than a frame for selling underwear. The few blemishes they found were quickly covered with make-up. The young woman who did it had studied his skin carefully and then selected the concealer from a large case of cosmetics.

The soft bristles of the brush tickled and he giggled, more from embarrassment than anything else. A table piled with underwear in his size was off to one side, out of the range of the set-up for the camera. He soon got used to being naked and changing from one set of underwear to the next in full view of everyone. There were many more people this time. The drawing room of an old house had been rented for the occasion. A dozen other models, both men and women, lounged about on sofas and chairs or stood before a fireplace. The men were wearing evening clothes, and the women formal gowns out of a movie from the 1930s. Owen was the only person less than fully dressed. He wore only underpants in various styles—briefs, bikinis, thongs. He stood in the centre of the group, holding a cocktail glass filled with water and a skewered olive, and pretending to engage in an animated conversation with the others.

Several of the other models were acting students, and they turned the shoot into a game. Each tried to outdo the others in making salacious remarks about Owen’s body while maintaining the charade of an elegant cocktail party and pretending that the nearly naked man in their midst was nothing unusual.

Owen’s body was the subject of constant primping to make it less shiny, to make it more shiny, to add highlights, to tone down highlights. It was hot under the lights, and at one point someone used cotton wool to soak up the sweat on this forehead. The next second another person stepped forward and sprayed his body with water to make it look as if he had been sweating. He smiled, he frowned, he tried to look sexy. Jimmy kept up a steady stream of instructions telling him where to look and what expression to have on his face.

The first few minutes he had felt uneasy about being the only naked person, but once the others turned it into a comedy, he relaxed and started playing the game as well. The day passed quickly. The humorous banter came across in the results. Despite the incongruity of a nearly naked man in the midst of a crowd of fully dressed people, the group looked as if they were enjoying themselves. After the session, some of the other models had invited him to join them for a drink. Owen ended up in bed with one of the men.

Three weeks later Jimmy called and invited him to his studio to meet with the advertising people. They offered him a contract to be the Quinn Man for the next six months. The sum offered was more than double his yearly income, all for a few days' work. The first series of ads were variations on the drawing room scene. Owen appeared clothed in only Quinn underwear amid a throng of fully dressed people. A crowd waiting to cross a street on a rainy day, everyone in raincoats and huddled under umbrellas except for Owen. A queue waiting to buy tickets in a train station, businessmen and -women reading folded newspapers, young tourists with backpacks consulting guidebooks, and Owen wearing nothing but a red bikini brief and an expression of impatience at the slow speed of the line. A crowd in the fruit and vegetable section of a supermarket, harried mothers trying to shop and keep track of toddlers at the same time, as Owen looked askance at the bunch of bananas he was holding in one hand.

There were eighteen such shots in all. In each shot, the background and the other people had been manipulated to appear in only black-and-white. The only colour in the image was Owen and the bold logo beneath the picture. ‘Quinn.’ No other word appeared in the pictures. Just ‘Quinn.’

He was identified as the model within hours of the appearance of the first ads. He finally switched off his mobile to get some peace. The second series of shots brought even more attention. This time he was posed alone, on a bed. In the first of the series the sheets and the pillows were unruffled. Owen’s arms were stretched above his head, his right hand lightly grasping his left wrist. The pose opened his body to the camera, making it totally available to the viewer. He smiled a confident invitation. The man in the picture knew that everyone who saw him would want to join him in bed.

In the succeeding shots, the bedclothes became increasingly disarranged. The photographs caught Owen from different angles, but always with his eyes looking directly at the viewer, except in the last image. In the final shot in the series, one of the pillows had tumbled unnoticed to the floor, and the other had been pushed to the far edge of the bed. Owen’s eyes were lidded, his body relaxed in languorous bliss. A corner of the sheet had been mounded over his crotch, covering the bare minimum needed to avoid charges of indecency. The pair of Quinn briefs he had been wearing in the series lay artfully rumpled next to his exposed hip.

*****

‘Oh, you’re hairy.’ The man who had invited him back to his flat stared at him in dismay. Owen had just unbuttoned his shirt and started pulling it free of his trousers. ‘You’re smooth in the pictures.’

‘Sorry. They remove all my hair for the shoots.’ Owen sighed inwardly. He didn’t have a lot of body hair, just a light fuzz on his chest and stomach. Before the photos had appeared, no one had even mentioned it. Now that he was being compared to the god in the Quinn advertisements, it had become a flaw. ‘I hope it doesn’t bother you.’

Along with the increasing number of bed partners had come an increasing number of complaints that he didn’t live up to the dream in the advertisements. Some were even disappointed to discover he didn’t wear Quinn underwear. His excuse—‘It’s uncomfortable’—offended their image of him. The loose, unfashionable boxer shorts he favoured upset his public.

One man had even noticed that Owen had a small mole on his abdomen that had been airbrushed out of the pictures. Owen found the proof that the man had studied his photographs that carefully both exhilarating and unnerving. Exhilarating because the man had paid so much attention to his body and unnerving because he had been reduced to an object to be studied.

The other man shook his head. ‘No, I don’t mind.’ But it was clear that he did. Owen’s reality had spoiled his Quinn fantasy. The man rushed the sex and then said pointedly, ‘If you want to use the toilet before you leave, Quinn, it’s through there, off the bedroom.’

That was the thing Owen resented most. He had lost his own name. ‘Quinn’. The name followed him down the street. If he stepped into the street or a store, he would be greeted with ‘There’s Quinn’. Strangers came up to him and called him that name, never thinking that he might have a name of his own.

The fame also brought benefits, Owen was honest enough with himself to admit that. It wasn’t just the money. He was also well paid with the coin of admiration. He had had partners before the photos appeared. He was handsome, after all. But the ad campaigns had changed how he was perceived, he found. His looks hadn’t changed, but the publicity had somehow made him more desirable, as if the public validation of his beauty in the ads increased his value. He could walk into the busiest club in London and have his pick of partner for the evening. Owen quickly learned that it wasn’t himself the chosen one wanted. He wanted to be seen with Owen, to be known as someone Owen had chosen, to have the cachet of his own desirability being recognised by someone everyone found desirable.

Owen would circle the club, acknowledging the salutes of the crowd, meeting eyes, and coolly appraising what was on offer that night. ‘That one, I’ll have that one,’ he would think. He would smile at the one and then stop to chat. The two of them might find themselves disappointed later, when they were alone, but for an hour or two in the club, everyone envied them. And the spark of recognition in the chosen one’s eyes, his delight upon being chosen, and the envy of others—those were enough for Owen.

Occasionally he was rebuffed. A famous singer in a boy band had smiled pleasantly and then said, ‘I have a lover.’ He had pulled another man forward and introduced him to Owen. Owen hadn’t believed him at first, he thought the man was joking. The singer could have anyone he wanted. Granted he wasn’t great looking, but with his fame he would have been able to get someone far better looking than himself. Instead he had chosen this nondescript man as his partner. The two lovers weren’t even attracted by the prospect of a threesome when Owen had hinted at the possibility. If anything, they seemed insulted, barely acknowledging the suggestion before moving away. Owen had felt a twinge of envy for the way they looked at each other, the way they were together in that throng. There seemed to be a protective circle around them excluding the crowd from their intimacy and their happiness. There were others like that. Their eyes might linger on Owen, but out of curiosity rather than a desire to possess. Owen wasn’t worth trading for what they already had or what they were waiting for.

Owen decided that he would eventually, when he was old, maybe in his mid-thirties, if his looks had started to fade, find someone to settle down with. But not now. Now there were too many opportunities to play. He would be a fool, he thought, to pass the riches life had to offer for the dull routines of married life and the monotony of the same person. Still, occasionally he found his thoughts drifting to the contentment in the singer’s voice when he had said, ‘I have a lover’.

But there weren’t many public rebuffs. Most of the time, he was successful in getting the partner he wanted. He grew less polite with those who approached him without permission, barely acknowledging their attempts at conversation, his eyes briefly resting on their face before slowly drifting elsewhere. They were not worth even the effort of an explicit refusal, his manner implied. It was, he told himself, what they deserved. The worst were those who had fantasised about him. As soon as they began speaking, it was clear that they had already been with Quinn in their minds. When Owen turned them down, they called him a ‘bitch’ or remarked loudly within his hearing that he was stuck on himself. Even some of the chosen ones got angry when Owen stubbornly resisted becoming the creature they thought they knew. Some waited until after the sex, as they hurriedly dressed, before making their disappointment known. They had wanted the Quinn Man. They didn’t want Owen, and that was increasingly all that he was willing to give them.

*****

‘You could wear dark glasses and a hat and old clothes. I’ve tried that occasionally when I want privacy. If you really want to go unrecognised, I suppose you could grow a beard and get a different haircut, even dye your hair.’ Jason idly turned the pages of a magazine he had picked up from the pile on the coffee table in Owen’s flat. He had listened patiently to Owen’s recital of grievances about the drawbacks of fame. Their friendship dated to their childhood and had survived Jason’s rise to fame as a member of the cast of Brighton Beach and Owen’s apotheosis as the Quinn Man.

‘Does that work?’

‘Not really. Maybe if it’s dark. Sometimes I get away with a disguise, and people don’t recognise me. It’s worse when I’m found out. Then the photos appear in the papers with captions like “Jason tries to hide from his fans”. I end up looking like a fool who’s been caught and exposed.’

‘I don’t want to be the one that has to change. I want them to change and stop thinking of me as the Quinn Man. I started chatting a guy up the other night. We were hitting it off, and then I realised he was talking to Quinn, and I lost interest. I went home by myself.’

‘Well, the ads will be over soon enough, won’t they? What is it, another two months and then there’s a new Quinn Man?’

‘Yes, the photos for that have already been shot.’

‘The problem will solve itself then. I don’t mean to be cruel, chum, but you’ll soon become “what’s-his-name?”. That’s even worse than being hounded by fans.’

‘That can’t happen soon enough for me.’

‘Do you really mean that?’ Jason tossed the magazine back on the table and took the next one in the stack. ‘Won’t you miss the attention?’

‘Not at all.’ Owen looked Jason in the eyes and tried to put as much conviction into his voice as he could.

‘Liar.’ Jason smiled at Owen with affection. ‘Why do you have all these magazines with your photos, then? You like looking at these pictures. And you like thinking about all the people looking at them and admiring you. Wishing they were you.’

Owen shrugged. ‘Yeah, a bit. How did you know that?’

‘I have files full of pictures of myself. I’m not as bad now, but when I first became known, I was obsessive about collecting everything about myself. I eventually had to limit myself to checking just once a day on Google for mentions of my name. Now I try to keep it to once a week. I won’t tell you what I did when YouTube became popular.’

‘I probably do the same thing. All right,’ Owen admitted, ‘I like being noticed. I just don’t like the other stuff. I just wish they liked me instead of my image.’

‘One goes with the other. Face it, people want the image of you. They have fantasies about you wanting them. Oh, this is the best picture of you.’

Owen sat down beside Jason on the sofa. The picture was a cropped version of his favourite shot from the first set that Jimmy had taken, before he had become the Quinn Man. Only his face and the upper part of his body were visible in the picture. On the left side of the picture, a tree trunk cut diagonally across the image, obscuring one side of his face, its bark a rough contrast to the smoothness of his face.

‘Why that one? It’s not revealing.’

‘You say that as if you’re disappointed that I didn’t chose one of your nude shots.’

Owen slid down slightly and rested his head against Jason’s shoulder. The fabric of Jason’s shirt was soft against his cheek. It was warm from Jason’s body. He rubbed his face against it two or three time before coming to rest. ‘Most people like the nudes. They like looking at my body.’

‘They’re okay. Sure I like looking at your body. But I felt I was intruding when I looked at those pictures. I guess I just want a more private view of you. This one, well, I suppose I like it because you look like the Owen I know.’ Jason traced the contour of Owen’s chin in the picture with the tip of a finger. ‘I wish you would look at me like that.’ Jason said that so softly that Owen wasn’t sure that he had heard.

‘What?’

Jason looked away, slightly embarrassed at being found out but equally as glad that he had made his feelings known. ‘Sorry, I have fantasies about you too. Don’t be angry. That’s why I don’t like the nude shots. I was always hoping that I would get to be the only person who saw your body.’

Owen sat up and drew apart from Jason. ‘I’m not angry. Just surprised. You’ve never said anything.’

‘Is it so surprising? I thought . . .’

‘What? What did you think?’

‘That you might know what I feel for you without my having to say anything. I guess I’m afraid that you don’t feel that way about me. That’s why I’ve never said anything. All your boyfriends and dates have always been as good-looking as you, and I thought maybe you feel that I’m not good enough for you.’ Jason finally looked at Owen, the expression on his face willing Owen to deny that statement.

The ache of Jason’s longing hung in the air between them. After a few seconds Owen moved closer again and wrapped his arms around Jason. But he had waited too long. It was a polite embrace when only a passionate one would have answered Jason in the way he wanted to be answered. Owen rubbed his palms up and down Jason’s back in a gesture meant to be comforting rather than arousing. When Jason tried to raise himself up to bring his face level with Owen’s, Owen put a hand on the back of Jason’s head and drew it into his neck. He didn’t want to risk what would follow a kiss. He owed Jason more than what would be at best charity.

A sob escaped Jason’s lips. ‘You’re so beautiful. I love you so much. I’ve wanted you for so long.’ It was, despite the words, an admission of defeat. He pushed himself back from Owen and said, ‘I’d better leave. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have spoken.’ He ran out without looking back.

The magazine had fallen to the floor when Jason stood up. Owen picked it up and looked at his image. ‘You’re so beautiful. I love you.’ A statement of cause and effect. And what if he were not so beautiful, would anyone want him then? There were ugly people who were loved. He had seen them and wondered how they managed to generate such feelings. It was not something he could experience. His looks guaranteed that he was desired for them. Everyone wanted him for his looks, not for what he was inside. Sometimes he wasn’t sure that there was an inside, just the shell that everyone wanted.

‘I wish you would look at me like that,’ Jason had said of this picture. Others read so much into Owen’s all-regarding look of wonderment and pleasure. Some saw Owen’s frank gaze as an invitation for intimacy. Some fantasised an encounter with an understanding friend, the Mr Right everyone wanted. If this were a picture of someone else, Owen speculated, what would I feel? Would I want that person?



‘What do I want?’ he asked himself. Would it be enough to be able to pull Jason forward in answer to someone hitting on him and say, ‘I have a lover’? To say it with pride, the astonishment he felt at his own good fortune apparent to everyone. To have someone, would that be enough to make him happy? Did the acceptance of another’s desire count as desire, of another’s love as love?

Jason was well known, almost famous. He and I would be thought well matched and lucky to have one another, thought Owen. We would become a celebrity couple. Our pictures would appear in the papers and magazines, entering clubs, attending the openings of films and shows, perhaps even shopping together. It was something to consider. It would end the series of disappointed and disappointing partners. And Jason was easy to talk with. Jason would solve a lot of problems.

He picked up his mobile and pressed the keys for Jason’s number. The phone rang several times and then the recording cut in with its automatic invitation to leave a message. Owen thought about leaving a message but then decided he would call again later. Or perhaps he would buy a bottle of champagne—and flowers, flowers would be a nice touch—and then drop by Jason’s flat unannounced. It might even be more effective if Jason were not in and came back to discover him waiting at this door. The repentant lover standing in the cold to apologise to his lover. It would make a nice story for the accounts that would appear later.

Tomorrow Island

Tabulae mundi mihi, The Island

(This will eventually be a segment of The Island.)

Nexis Pas
(c) 2010 by the author.

Tomorrow Island

‘And is it something you’ll be wanting then? Or are you just after watching other folk work?’ Mr Cusack looked up at me from the deck of his boat, several feet below where I stood on shore. He spoke gruffly, but with the sort of friendly gruffness that the men of Munfrees reserved for not unwelcome breaks from their labours. The gruffness was to let you know that he was busy, as you clearly were not or you would not be bothering him, but—and this was part of the gruffness too—you were not to abuse his willingness to stop and talk with you a bit.

I had been standing there for several minutes waiting for him to acknowledge my presence, wondering if it would be all right for me to speak. I was still unsure of myself around the villagers. Their lives were devoted to activities unfamiliar to me, and in the first days after we arrived in Munfrees I had peppered them with questions. My mother and Aunt Alyce had encouraged me to be curious. Unlike the other behaviours they tried to instil in me, curiosity was a habit I was happy to pursue zealously. But I quickly learned that the inhabitants of Munfrees did not always welcome children’s interruptions. My ‘What are you doing?’ would elicit a scowl and a dark look more often than an answer. That didn’t stop me from being curious—but I usually exercised my curiosity at a careful distance. That day, however, I had a reason for being there, and that emboldened me now that I had received permission to speak. ‘My aunt sent me to ask, Mr Cusack, if we could please have a fish tomorrow.’

‘And did she say what kind? There are lots of fish in the ocean. Is it a whale she’ll be wanting or a mackerel?’ He shook his head with the amused puzzlement that the villagers often greeted the ignorance of outsiders such as ourselves.

Mr Cusack was the only commercial fisherman remaining at Munfrees. Old Mrs Ahern had told us that when she had been a girl, there had been a dozen, and small boats had crowded the sheltered inlet just north of the last house in Munfrees. My aunt had asked if it was possible to buy fish in Munfrees, and Mrs Ahern had explained the villagers’ arrangement with Mr Cusack. But as often happened in Munfrees, the present quickly led to the past.

‘The boats were painted all different colours, so you could look out and tell who was setting out or returning.’ She stared toward the inlet where the boats had been moored. At some time in the past, a stone wall had been built out in the deeper part of the inlet to provide a dock. The landward side had been filled in with dirt and rocks to form a level platform. ‘Those men were so proud of their boats. Everything about them had to be perfect. Treated them like a member of the family, they did. Better than their families, some of them. They always painted them in bright colours, and in the evening when the water was still and all the boats tied up along the wall, the reflections shimmered in the water. When I was small, I used to pretend that the water was covered with bright cloths, just floating there on the surface. Like the clothes the bishop wore when he came to confirm us, all red and green and gold. It was magic.’ She paused and sighed, and then voiced the frequently heard lament, ‘Oh well, that’s all gone now. The others have all died or given over fishing or moved elsewhere. There’s only Donal Cusack now.’

Mr Cusack’s May was usually the only boat tied up alongside the old stone wall. True to tradition, he had painted his boat. The hull was blue and the small cabin a bright red. Unless the weather was truly foul, every day but Sunday Mr Cusack left Munfrees at first light and returned in mid-afternoon. He sold most of his catch further south, to the processing plants in Killybegs. Anyone in Munfrees who wanted a fish would ask him the night before, and Mr Cusack would bring it back the next day. He expected you to meet his boat, however, and have a basin ready to carry the fish back home. He had told my aunt that the first time she asked him for a fish. ‘I’m not a deliveryman,’ he said. ‘I’ve been working all day, and I’m ready for a pint and a smoke. This isn’t Dublin, and I’ll not be waiting on you. You clean the fish yourself or have the lad do it. And there’s no credit. If you ask me to save you a fish and don’t have the money, then you won’t get the fish and you’ll not be needing to ask me again.’

‘She says, a whitefish please, enough for our tea tomorrow and then for a fish pie the next day, Mr Cusack. And she says to ask, please, if she could have some heads for the broth.’

Mr Cusack considered the request for a moment and then nodded. ‘Tell Miss Collins she will have her fish. And it will be three shillings, lad.’

My mission accomplished, I was in no hurry, and I sat down on the old wall, with my legs dangling over the water, a few feet seaward from where Mr Cusack’s boat was tied up. The sea was calm that day, and each incoming wave lifted the water only a half-foot or so. The shape of the inlet and the position of the wall to one side meant that the waves flowed down the inlet perpendicular to where I sat. The crest of the wave would charge down the wall, lifting the seaweed attached to the stones and raising the water toward me but not so close that my topboots were in danger of getting wet. I could safely entertain thoughts of being swept into the water and going home soaked.

Out of the corner of my eyes, I watched Mr Cusack as he cleaned his nets and washed down the deck of his boat. He must have been in his late sixties or early seventies at that time. Years of exposure to the North Atlantic had permanently wrinkled his face and hands. His clothes were for a much larger man, as if he had shrunk over the years. He was almost lost within them. It was warmer than usual that day, and he had tossed his yellow mac up onto the wall beside the other gear he planned to take with him. He wore an old white pullover and had pushed the sleeves up, exposing thin forearms corded with muscle and ribbed with hard veins. His small boat rocked with every wave, but he compensated effortlessly for the motion, as if years of waves had imprinted themselves on the movements of his body.

He worked for about five minutes without appearing to notice me. He wasn’t even looking at me when he asked, ‘And what does your aunt put in her fish pie, then?’

‘She says that she will teach me how to gather sea lettuce and mussels and we will have those in the pie.’

‘No potatoes?’

‘Lots of potatoes. And onions too, I think.’ At best my notions of what went into a fish pie were vague. The dish clearly contained fish, and it was a pie, but that exhausted my knowledge and my expectations. I had eaten fish pies before, but not with the attentiveness to the contents the discussion had grown to demand. My aunt had proposed the idea earlier that day as a way of using what was available for free along the shores of Munfrees. Mr Cusack seemed to expect potatoes, and so I supplied them. Onions showed up frequently in Aunt Alyce’s cooking, and they seemed a probable addition.

He considered those ingredients for a moment and then said thoughtfully, as if he were tasting the pie in his imagination, ‘I like a bit of cabbage in mine.’

‘Me too.’ I tried very hard to sound as judiciously adult as Mr Cusack.

He gazed at me speculatively as if testing my remark for irony or mockery and then chuckled, ‘You’ll be thinking then that a bit of cabbage improves most everything?’

It was my turn to test that ingredient against my imagination. ‘Well, not a pudding. You wouldn’t want cabbage in a pudding.’

‘Now, lad, old Mrs Sheahan that lived next to Feelihy’s shop—you know that house to the left?’

I nodded.

‘Well, she made a fine cabbage pudding. She was famous for her cabbage pudding. They even knew about her cabbage pudding down in Sligo. She sent them down by the mailman’s cart. Even the magistrate used to beg his housekeeper for a slice of Mrs Sheahan’s cabbage pudding.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘She died and took the receipt for her cabbage pudding with her. Nobody knows how to make it now. So you’ll never get to taste it, lad. Tis a pity. You tell your ma and your aunt about it. Maybe they can put it in one of those books they’re writing. Old Mrs Sheahan and her cabbage pudding that was famous down to Sligo.’

I took Mr Cusack’s willingness to talk to me as permission to engage in further conversation. ‘Where do you catch the fish, Mr Cusack?’

‘Where the fish are, lad. That’s the only trick there is to fishing. Go to where the fish are if you want to catch them.’

‘But how do you know where they are?’

‘Can’t tell you that, lad. That’s my secret. If I tell you, then you’ll be able to find your own fish. Won’t need me. That wouldn’t be half clever of me, would it?’

‘I won’t tell anyone. I promise. And I don’t have a boat. I couldn’t go out. Unless you took me.’

‘I can’t do that.’ Mr Cusack was suddenly serious. ‘It’s dangerous out there, lad.’

‘I’ll be careful.’

‘No, it wouldn’t do. It’s only luck and St Peter that’ve kept me alive this long.’ He said this with such finality that I knew better than to ask again. My disappointment must have shown because his next words were, ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you where the best fishing is. But you have to promise not to tell anyone.’

I solemnly vowed never to reveal the location of his fishing grounds. He stepped off his boat and sat down beside me. He looked around, scouring the vicinity for anyone who might overhear what he was about to say. When he was satisfied that we were alone, he pointed out to sea and whispered, ‘You see that island out there? Some fish like to feed in shallow waters, around islands and such like. And that’s where I’ll be fishing tomorrow.’

I followed the direction of his finger. I shook my head. ‘There’s nothing out there.’

‘Well, that’s where I catch my fish. By that island.’

‘But there’s no island there.’

‘Well, you can’t see it today. It’s called Tomorrow Island, and it’s there where today meets tomorrow. It’ll be right where I need it to be tomorrow.’

‘So I’ll be able to see it tomorrow.’

‘No, tomorrow it will be today, and then the island won’t be around. It will already be in tomorrow’s tomorrow. It’s never in today. That’s why we can’t see it. It’s always at the edge of tomorrow.’

‘But how do you know it’s there if you can’t see it? What if your boat crashes into it?’

‘I’m not in any danger if I stay in today. Now if I were in tomorrow, it would be a different story.’

‘Does anybody live there?’

‘Now how would I be knowing that, lad? I would have to get to Tomorrow Island to find that out.’

I could see Tomorrow Island in my imagination. I knew that Mr Cusack was pulling my leg, but the story was to my liking and I began to embroider it. ‘I bet lots of people live there. But they don’t know about us. Because we’re in yesterday to them.’

‘Well, now, people have been telling me that you’re a clever lad. And I can see that you are.’ He smiled and then braced an arm on the ground to balance himself as he prepared to stand up. ‘We’ll talk about it another time. For now, I better get on. Things to do before I go to bed. You tell your aunt she’ll have her fish tomorrow.’ He took two or three gingerly steps as if unsure that his legs would support him. ‘Ah, it’s hell to grow old, lad. Avoid it. That’s my advice to you.’ He rotated his neck slowly to the left and then to the right to loosen it as he walked back to where he had left his gear and bent over to pick it up.

‘Mr Cusack?’

He turned to look at me again. ‘What, lad?’

‘Do you think you’ll ever reach Tomorrow Island?’

‘Of course. One day. That’s the thought that keeps me going. One morning I’ll sail out to do a bit of fishing, and there will be Tomorrow Island, right where I need it to be.’ He looked over my head toward the ocean. A wistful look crossed his face.

When he said nothing, I prodded him to continue. ‘What happens then?’

‘I’ll settle down. It’s a better life there, I’m sure of that. I’ll be young and sturdy again, and the fish will jump right into me boat. I won’t even have to set me nets. So I’d be a fool to come back here. Anyway, there’s no coming back from tomorrow, is there? So even if I wanted to come back, I couldn’t.’

‘But . . .’

‘Ah, lad, leave off. That’s enough talk for a day. You had me saying more today than I usually say in a week. Whenever I start talking, I end up saying something foolish—that’s what I’ve found in this life. Better to keep me mouth shut. Now you, you talk so much you’ll soon run out of things to say. They’ll be other days. You don’t have to say everything today. You spend all your words today, and you won’t have any tomorrow. You’ll be like Michael Garrity. Fond of hearing hisself talk, that one was. He talked so much that he grew thinner and thinner. Just used hisself up in talking. He got so light that one day he was standing in front of Feelihy’s talking away and the wind just picked him and blew him away up over the hills, and we never saw him again.’ He was smiling at me as he said those words. So I knew they were friendly. I wasn’t so much being told to keep quiet as to save the conversation for another day.

He turned away for a final time and began walking up the street. I almost offered to help him carry part of his gear, but something about the set of his shoulders and the careful way he held his head up told me the offer would be refused. He might have forgiven me for insinuating that he needed help—I was after all an ignorant child from Dublin. He would have considered a similar offer from anyone else in the village an insult. I would guess that the only day anyone carried anything for Mr Cusack was the day they took his corpse in a coffin to St Anne’s for the funeral mass.

The wall was anchored on the seaward end by a little hillock of shale. I stepped up onto it and looked out to sea. The ocean was calm that day, and a golden path of sunlight stretched across the water toward the horizon. I traced it out as far as I could see. At the end of the path the dark, faint mass of Tomorrow Island hovered at the edge of the world. I felt that if the sun would remain in the sky long enough, I could walk there.

And on Tomorrow Island, a boy much like me stared back at yesterday along the golden highway .