Counting Stars (12 page)

“And still he runs, keeping himself out of Hell,” she said.

She patted my hand.

“It couldn’t happen now. Not now. Not in these days of enlightenment and loss of faith.”

Buffalo Camel Llama Zebra Ass

I
NSIDE THE ROOF OF THE BLUE TENT
the zodiac was painted in gold. During the interval we stared upward and Colin showed us all which signs we were. The symbols were faded and flaked, were no brighter than the sawdust in the ring far below. The spangles of the trapeze girl as she swung through the lights had been the brightest things up there. Now she walked sadly before us in a tightly fastened mac and dusty shoes and sold nuts and Mars bars from a tray balanced at her waist.

Margaret knocked me in the ribs.

“Colin’s a lion,” she said. “Catherine’s a goat. You’re an ugly bull.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s why there’s such a stink in here.”

“But you mustn’t believe it,” said Colin. “It’s a pagan thing.”

He took out his wallet again and went to the girl and bought chocolate for us all.

“They saw animals and gods in the stars,” I said. “They thought the stars showed what would happen and what they should do.”

“And we don’t believe that,” said Mary.

“God gave us free will. We choose what to do. We decide whether to be good or to be bad.”

We ate the chocolate and waited for the interval to end. I imagined the girl flying across the roof of the tent toward my outstretched arms. Mary asked how she could be twins when there was only one of her. Margaret said she’d like to be the fish, swimming deep down in the sea with seals and dolphins. Catherine said it was best to be the water carrier, helping thirsty and worn-out travelers, and anyway you just had to stay what you were born as.

The clowns came on and threw buckets of shredded paper at us. They sawed the trapeze girl in two and pretended to forget how to put her together again. She returned with other girls and they stood on the backs of horses that raced furiously around the ring. Men from Russia in singlets and tights balanced from each other’s brows on long silver poles. In the posters there’d been elephants and tigers, but neither of them came. The band played in the end, and animals were brought on as a final entertainment for the children. There was a little buffalo, a camel, a llama, a zebra and an ass. They trotted round and round the ring. A Russian stood at the center, flicking a long whip at them. Such an odd arrangement, so precisely trained: the muscular wide-horned buffalo; the dusty grunting camel with wobbly hump and gangly legs; the dainty llama with its neck so stiff and its eyes alert; the sprightly synthetic zebra; the poor little damp-eyed ass. From the crowd they drew appreciation, much tender sighing, and of course a little mockery upon themselves.

In the doorway as we filed out from the tent, the trapeze girl in her mac sold models of a monkey who climbed to the top of a ladder and tumbled down again.

“Where were the tigers?” asked Margaret. “Where were the elephants?”

The girl turned her sad eyes to us.

“They’ve been poorly,” she said. “Not well at all.”

She shrugged.

“Buy them a monkey,” she said to Colin, but he shook his head. We turned away and entered the field outside.

“It’s only a small circus after all,” said Colin.

“Ass, buffalo, camel, llama, zebra,” said Mary. “Alphabetical order.”

We pondered the truth of this.

“So where would the elephant have fitted in?” said Catherine.

“Too big,” said Mary. “It’d squash the others.”

“In the alphabet, nit.”

“Between camel and llama. And the tiger’d go in after llama and eat them all.”

“Where would you three go?” said Margaret. “The goat, the lion and the ugly bull.”

We worked it out, told each other. We positioned many more: porcupines, rhinoceros, spiders, moles. We named an animal for each letter, an alphabet of beasts.

Above us the stars began to appear.

“Did God give the animals their names?” said Mary.

No answer.

“When He made them, He must have said what this one was and this one was.”

Again no answer.

“Are the names we use the same as the names God uses? Does He call the zebra zebra and the camel camel?”

“We can’t know,” said Catherine. “We just can’t know.”

We walked on, away from the tent, toward the nearby road where the bus stops were. Already long queues were forming there.

Mary put her index fingers out above her brow and played the buffalo. Margaret lowered her head and grunted and hunched her shoulders, a camel. They trotted gently on before us.

Then came a woman’s voice: “Who’s allowing them to do this?”

We stopped and found Marion MacNabola’s mother close behind us. Marion was at her side in a tight blue coat, the monkey toy dangling from her hand.

“Do you know that God gave us eternal souls to separate us from all other creatures?” said Mrs. MacNabola.

Mary and Margaret paused and turned.

“Do you know that?”

We nodded.

“And do you know that it is an insult to God if we lower ourselves and imitate the beast?”

No answer.

“You are in charge of these children,” she said. “You must not allow them to wander into sin.”

Colin looked down and lit a cigarette.

Marion stared wide-eyed at us all from behind her mother.

I could see that Mary and Margaret wanted to laugh.

“You do want to see your daddy again, don’t you?” said Mrs. MacNabola.

Mary and Margaret returned to us. We faced the woman, the circus lights, the dwindling crowd approaching us and passing by.

“Think about it,” she said.

I thought about it. I thought of everything I’d been told, that his pain was over, that he was in Heaven, that he waited for us there. I thought of him and prayed for him each night, as I’d been told to, even as I felt the faith deserting me.

Mrs. MacNabola raised her finger.

“He’ll be watching you,” she said. “Think of your eternal souls.”

And she shook her head, walked on, drew her daughter toward the road.

“Pig,” whispered Margaret.

“Cow,” whispered Mary.

We giggled, waited, allowed the woman to get far ahead of us. We searched the sky for the constellations of the zodiac. Colin said that the stars had changed position since the first astrologers had seen the lion, the goat, the bull and all the rest.

“You could make yourself see anything,” said Mary. “Couldn’t you?”

The stars were the spangles of a costume. The trapeze girl was a great arrangement of points of light against the dark.

“Will we come back again?” said Margaret.

Colin shook his head. No. The circus would travel on.

We moved again across the pale dusty field toward the road.

“Can Daddy see us now?” said Margaret.

Yes, we all assured her.

We went through the fence, stood in the queue beneath the streetlights. Behind us, the summit of the blue tent mingled with the sky.

“What would happen if we called the zebra camel?” said Mary.

We laughed and gave the animals the names of other animals.

“What’s a horse?” said Mary.

“A dog,” said Catherine.

“No, a goose.”

“Stop it, Michelle,” I said to Mary.

“Sorry, Simon,” she answered.

A bus came, and the first half of the queue climbed aboard. Mrs. MacNabola watched us sternly through the window. Marion played gently with the monkey.

Margaret turned her face up to the light and closed her eyes. Catherine put an arm around her.

“Yes, he can,” she whispered. “Yes. Yes.”

Soon the next bus came, we climbed aboard.

Catherine Colin Margaret Mary Me.

Where Your Wings Were

F
OR A LONG TIME AFTER
B
ARBARA DIED,
Mam used to pull my shoulders forward, kiss me, and slip her fingers beneath my shoulder blades.

“You as well,” she’d whisper. “Just like Barbara, you as well. This is where your wings were. You left them behind when you came here. But be good, and you’ll have them back again, one day.”

Barbara was an angel. One of those that God takes early. She was too good to stay here long. She died in infancy, flew straight into God’s arms.

At night I tried to imagine her there. I lay in my bed, closed my eyes, tried to dream of her. I told myself that if I did see her, then it wouldn’t be dreaming. It would be real. I whispered her name: “Barbara. Little sister, little angel. Let me see you again.” But it wasn’t to be. With my eyes closed or with my eyes open, all I could see was the darkness spreading all around.

As I grew older, and could feel the goodness leaving me, I tried to pray to Barbara, but the words appeared to go nowhere, and they brought me no comfort. Often I fingered my own shoulder blades and tried to imagine my wings, tried to imagine the feathers, bones and muscles known only to angels. But my fingers encountered my skin, my flesh, my bone: a simple human shape, nothing more. I searched my memory, tried to remember being there myself, so that I might try harder to return. I retreated, went back and back, remembered further, further, tried to imagine being inside my mother, then the time that preceded being inside my mother. But I could go no further than when I was an infant of two, maybe three, certainly before Barbara came. My first memory was nothing of note, just me sitting in a pushchair staring up at Mam, and Dad at her side. I believe we’re in the garden, we’ve just come through the gate. My parents are so tall, so dark, silhouetted against the blazing sun. I see Mam lean toward me, smiling. “Look at him,” she says, and I hear their gentle laughter. “You all right, my little angel?” she asks. I feel her light touch on my cheek, hear the first words I remember, naming me as an angel.

Before that moment, it is as if there’s nothing. I do not exist. Trying to go back only emphasizes my going forward. I become older. And as a boy, as I grew older, I felt myself heading further and further toward a terrible dark.

It was painful to lie there failing to imagine Barbara, with my parents sleeping in the room next door, and to feel the time of dreams approaching. There seemed to be nothing I could do about these dreams. I didn’t want them, I didn’t encourage them. I didn’t even have to imagine them. They just came out of the night, out of my skull. They came at me, night after night after night.

I confessed the dreams. At church, I knelt in front of the screen and told Father O’Mahoney about them. He was an old man with a gentle Irish voice that never seemed to criticize anything. I knew he must have heard everything before, but I wanted him to get angry, to shout at me, to warn me of terrible punishments. But he just listened and whispered,

“Yes . . . Oh, dear now . . . Yes . . .”

And then he forgave me, told me to pray for purity, and gave me a penance of Our Fathers, Hail Marys, Glory Bes. It was too easy. Even as I said the penance, kneeling at the altar rail, I knew it would happen again, and I wanted to be punished for it properly, before it became worse.

The dreams of course were about women and girls, about any woman or any girl who had caught my eye during the day.

In the effort to displace these dreams, and to supplement the penances of Father O’Mahoney, I spent many of these nights bringing to mind the day of Barbara’s death. Late winter, an unblemished morning, sun streaming in at my window, a chorus of songbirds, silence in the house. Still early, 7
A
.
M
. The day before me stretching endless and unused and filled with hope. And then movement, Mam rising, her awful, awful cry. Our poorly sister wouldn’t wake, couldn’t wake, was already gone to God. Our mother pursued her, called after her, begged her, gripped our sister in her arms and refused to relinquish her. Colin, Catherine and I gathered at the fringes, useless. A whole morning of prayer and protest and lamentation, till such silence, and despite the sunlight such darkness, fell again. The doctor was allowed to confirm our sister’s death, Father O’Mahoney to pray over her. We stumbled from the corners, Mam let us and Dad into her arms, and we wept together and held our cold and long-gone little sister in our useless arms.

The dreams changed. One night my head was filled with a kind of fluttering. I turned toward it and saw an angel landing in my dark. She came toward me, floating rather than walking. She was clothed only in white fire, and her wings stood high behind her, covered in pure white feathers, like those of doves. Through the fire I could see her body, shaped like any woman’s, but more beautiful than any woman’s. Without speaking, she came to me and I felt her fire all over and inside me. I lay stunned, watching her wings beating gently above us, pure white against the dark.

I told Father O’Mahoney. He listened in silence. Then there was concern in his voice.

“The tricks of the Devil,” he said. “They will adopt the most exquisite of shapes. Resist them all. Be firm.”

I said my penances. But I was far gone. I knew that my angel would come again, that again she would be wonderful, the most wonderful thing I’d known. Night after night she came to wrap me in her fire, and I welcomed her, embraced her, though I knew she was leading me to Hell.

One night, after she’d been with me for hours, her wings began to beat more quickly and I felt myself being lifted. I held on tight, gazed into her perfect face as we began to fly through the gentle winds of the dark. She kept looking down at me, smiling to reassure me. We traveled for an age, until the dark began to change and we entered a pink dawn that slowly changed to white until the light itself was her fire, and she was so absorbed by it that I could no longer see her. I knew she was there only by feeling her tight in my arms, and by the continued rhythmic beating of her wings. I looked from side to side, wanting to see where we were, but there was only the fire on all sides, going on forever.

I woke in my crumpled bed. There was frost on the window, snow outside. I closed my eyes tight, wanting the angel again, but I was awake, it was ordinary daylight, and she was gone.

I didn’t confess it. I told myself it was just a dream, nothing to do with becoming bad. I just told the old dreams, the old women and girls. Father O’Mahoney said, “Remember that the body is God’s temple, and each of us is forever in God’s thoughts.”

The next time, it started like snow falling, a thousand flakes falling from the darkness, each flake a glowing white flame. Then I saw the wings, and beneath the wings the bodies, each one a woman’s, but more beautiful than any woman’s. A whole flight of angels landed in my dark.

The angel I knew came to me first. Then the others one by one came to join her, until there were a thousand angels with me, and wherever I turned was filled with their white fire, their tender faces, their brilliant bodies, their beating wings.

We went together, all of us, through the winds of the dark, a fiery swarm with me at the center, until we entered the pink again and then the white. They peeled away from me there, leaving me the one blemish in all that white. I threw my arms out frantically, striking wings and faces and hair, until my hand was taken and the angel drew me toward her and laid her arm across my shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” she whispered, and I could tell by the way she spoke that she was smiling. “There’s someone to see you.”

She took my hands and stretched them out into the brightness. My fingertips encountered skin, hair, eyes, a tender cheek. I felt the lips part, felt breath breaking into laughter.

“Barbara,” I gasped. “Barbara.”

I reached down, I lifted her, and at her back I felt the quick fluttering of her own small wings. She put her arms around my neck and kissed me and spoke my name.

“Oh, Barbara,” I gasped.

So much more I wanted to say. So much more I wanted to cry out. But I became speechless. I could only hold her, feel her as happy and tiny as she always was, feel the life continuing to burn and sparkle in her.

“You see?” she said, and her voice was filled with delight. “You see? I’m all right. Everything’s all right.”

Then she was gone, suddenly, flying out into the light, and I knew there was no way to follow her.

“You see?” the angel whispered. “You see?”

“But how . . . ?” I said. “How?”

She pressed a finger to my lips.

“Come with me,” she said. “But never say a word.”

We moved forward, and the white fire burned even more brightly, so brightly that I had to close my eyes against it. When we stopped, she whispered, “Listen.”

I could hear nothing, only my own breathing and the beating of my heart.

“Listen.”

I started to ask what I should listen for, but then I heard it. Further into the fire, someone else was breathing. Long breaths in and long breaths out, filled with low groans, soft rattling and whistling sounds.

“Hear it?”

“Yes.”

She turned me away, and we went back, to where I could open my eyes again.

“What was it?” I asked.

“That was God, fast asleep. He’ll wake up soon. Hold on tight.”

Back we came through the pink and the black, and into my room’s darkness, where we came to rest. She giggled as Barbara had, and held me at arm’s length, preparing to leave.

“Don’t go,” I said.

“Everyone will wake up soon,” she said.

“When can I come back again?” I asked.

She touched my cheek and smiled and shook her head.

“One day,” she said. “When you have your wings again.”

And for the last time she stayed with me, and the white fire that did not burn spread far into me, making me understand how it feels to be angelic. Then she was gone, diminishing to a snowflake, disappearing into the dark. . . .

That day Mam did again what she so often did. She pulled my shoulders forward and kissed me.

“You’re the bright one this morning,” she said.

I laughed.

I let her slip her fingers beneath my shoulder blades.

“Where my wings were,” I said. “Where they’ll be again.”

She held me close.

“It’s true,” she said. “Even though you’re growing up so fast, you have to keep on knowing that it’s true.”

I reached up and for the first time slipped my fingers beneath her own shoulder blades.

“You as well,” I told her.

“Yes, me as well. All of us. Barbara, you, me, all of us. Everybody.”

And then we were silent, and we felt for a moment the fire within us burning, until Dad came in, and we giggled, imagining together the white feathers rising from his hairy back and beyond his balding head.

It was the first time I had asked Father O’Mahoney anything, and it was the first time he became angry.

“If we’re like this when we’re in God’s thoughts,” I said, “what are we like when we’re in His dreams?”

His hand struck the thin screen between us. He shouted at my blasphemy and gave me five decades of the rosary to say. I didn’t say them, though. I knew that God slept, that even angels weren’t always good, that I’d have my wings back one day, and that dreams were only dreams.