Stone Kingdoms (5 page)

4

There
is a rim of rust under the metal clips which fasten the mirror to the dresser; the glass is mottled and marked in places I have forgotten about. As I look into it for the final time I feel no nostalgia for the past, no desire to touch the childhood years which lurk somewhere below its cold surface. Even though it is summer outside, the skies scud low and heavy and the sea itself seems inert and lifeless. I am eighteen years old, and when I stare into the mirror there is no flicker of recognition from it, no sense of homecoming. My life exists in another place with friends and secrets that this room has never shared. Only my father belongs in this place, lying below in the front room, the coffin lid locked and the morning sunlight splashing the brass handles and glistening the cut glass on the sideboard.

As my mother makes tea for yet another set of half-forgotten cousins, I quietly open the door of his study. It smells like the church used to when we opened it on a Sunday morning; sepulchral, waiting for some resurrection. I enter without knocking but feel furtive, and as I close the door behind me I half-expect to hear his footsteps. The desk top is bare apart from a pen and a few sheets of notepaper already beginning to yellow and curl. I sit for the first time in his chair with its worn green arm-rests and wonder why he sat with his back to the window, staring at nothing but the flock-papered wall and a couple of black-framed certificates. I try the two desk drawers and find them locked as my mother enters.

‘
There wasn't anything much in them,' she says. ‘Church business, letters, that sort of thing.'

‘He spent a lot of his time here, didn't he?'

‘He needed peace to prepare his sermons. I suppose he couldn't concentrate with all our foolish chatter and the radio on.'

‘You'll miss him, won't you?'

‘Yes, I'll miss him.'

‘He used to like your singing. Sometimes he pretended he wasn't listening but he liked to hear your voice.'

She smiles and smoothes her hair. Outside there are voices in the hall and the sound of the front door opening and closing.

‘I don't think he was so keen on the Gaelic ones. He probably thought I'd joined the other side.'

‘Where will you live?'

‘I can stay here as long as I need to. They don't throw church widows out on the street. It'll take them some time to find someone new. There's a pension as well. And enough money to see you through university, so you don't need to worry.'

‘Why don't you come with me to Belfast? We could share a flat.'

‘I don't belong in Belfast, Naomi. I'd only be in the way. You've got your own life now. I've been thinking of moving in with your grandparents – they're both getting on now. And they could do with someone to help out in the shop.'

She stands on the other side of the desk in her black dress and cardigan and for some reason I remember her wedding photograph – the white dress, the wild roses in her hair. Now it feels as if time is arching round her, waiting to reclaim her, and I don't know what to do to help her, how to break through the accepted pieties which always governed our lives in that house.

‘My father was a good swimmer....'

The words tremble like motes in the dusty silence of the room as she stares over my shoulder through the window. A long grey hair curls on the collar of her cardigan.

‘
The currents can be treacherous.'

The front bell rings and she turns towards the door, then hesitates. ‘Your father was tired, Naomi. Maybe he just couldn't struggle any more.'

As the door closes I sit on, let my hands brush the grain of the wood, and then I too go back to serving tea and receiving sympathy.

There are more people at the funeral than I could have imagined. People I don't know, representatives of different organizations and interests, a road of black-suited mourners following the cortège to the church between hedgerows flecked with white. It is the first time I have seen the church full – even the parish priest attends, and speaks kindly to my mother. But it is a relief when it's all over, the last cup and saucer dried and stored away in cupboards, the final mourner woken from his slumber and gone. My mother puts on the radio but she keeps the volume so low that it's almost inaudible, and we sit in the kitchen and talk only of small things. To my surprise she produces a bottle of what looks like communion wine and fills two glasses. We try to drink it, our faces mirroring each other's grimaces, and then we toss it in the sink, throw back our heads and laugh. The sound fountains up through the empty house and suddenly falls back silently about our heads.

That night as I lie in my bed and listen to the shuffle of the sea I hear her voice singing softly, and when I put on my dressing gown I go downstairs and find her sitting by the stove warming milk. The sink still wears its red stain like a birthmark. She makes us milky coffee and we sit cupping it in both hands. Her hair is down, the grey tresses coiled about her shoulders. She turns on the radio and there is the sound of a voice simmering into passion, but as I watch her sip from her cup it is not the voice I want to hear.

‘Can I brush your hair?'

She smiles and sets the cup on the table, points to her bag on
the
sideboard. Taking the brush, I start to move it gently through the coarsening strands. I turn off the radio.

‘Will you sing to me?'

‘What would you like?'

‘One of the old songs you used to sing.'

I half-remember the tune, the sound of words I do not understand, as it slowly fills the room. And then I see it again, the white sliver of scar on her scalp and when I touch it with the tip of my finger she laughs and jokes that I'll be wanting her to tell the story about getting knocked down and the presents from America.

‘Sure, what use would I be in Belfast with all those cars racing about? I'm still not safe crossing the road.'

She jokes too about her grey hair, and says that you can buy bottles in Neeson's chemist's that promise you any colour under the sun. I go on brushing, lifting and separating the strands, and tell her not to be silly.

‘That's good coming from you, Naomi – the number of nights I had to listen to you moaning about the colour of your hair and begging me to dye it for you. You used to really hate it.'

‘I don't love it yet but I've got used to it.'

Suddenly her hand grips my wrist. ‘Your hair is beautiful, Naomi.'

And then she takes the brush from my hand and makes me sit before starting to work. For a second there is only the soft rasp and stroke of the brush, and then I ask her.

‘Do you ever think of worlds other than this one?'

‘You mean like Heaven?'

‘No, real worlds, other places, countries, cities, different from here.'

‘I suppose I did when I was your age, I don't really remember.'

‘You never wanted to live anywhere else?'

‘Not really. I always thought this was where I belonged. It
could've
been different, though, there was a rep who used to come to the shop who had a bit of an eye for me – it was before I met your father. Travelled all over Ireland in a company car. But it never came to anything.'

‘And were you happy with my father?'

She stops brushing for a moment.

‘Yes, I was happy. Your father was good to me, and in his own way he was good to you. I know....'

I hold her hand, stop the brush from shaking. ‘I know, it's all right, it's all right. It's late now.'

We turn back to our coffees but skins have formed on the surfaces. She gets a spoon and skims them off, then switches on the radio. ‘You're right, let's get cleared up and go to bed,' she says, busying herself at the sink.

When we have finished I go to switch off the radio but she tells me to leave it, excusing the eccentricity with a smile and putting out the kitchen light as I begin to mount the stairs. I wait for her at the top and we hug, giggling like schoolgirls as we stand on each other's feet. As I turn to my room she calls after me, ‘Sleep with me tonight.' I think she means in her room but I can't lie in my father's place, and so I take her hand and we climb into my bed and I fall asleep to the sound of her breathing, the break of the sea, and distant voices on the radio.

5

It
took a day and a half's journey by truck to reach the camp at Bakalla. As dusk fell, we pulled off the dirt road and pitched our tents in the shelter of the truck. We had already dropped people at various projects along the route. The husband and wife doctors were staying at the capital to work in the new Red Cross hospital and that left Haneen our driver, Veronica, Martine and myself. It had been breathlessly hot and stuffy in the back of the canvas-topped truck, the packing cases of supplies and equipment bouncing about on the bumpy road and sometimes sliding into our knees and shins. Haneen seemed determined to reach Bakalla as quickly as he could and the countryside unravelled in a veil of dust and exhaust fumes. Insects, mistaking the green of the canvas for vegetation, landed and sunned themselves and once after an undignified communal toilet stop we returned to find what looked like a locust settled on the top of a tool box. We sat, stiff-backed against the side of the truck, until I cupped it in my hands and threw it out, unable to disguise a shiver.

At night Haneen gathered some scrub wood and lit a fire, the wispy smoke flitting skywards between fireflies and moths, while around us stretched the softened shapes of acacia trees, some of them bent over on themselves like inverted question marks. But it is the sky I remember – thick, palpable, studded with stars. Sometimes a shooting star flickered briefly, and we chatted excitedly like Girl Guides at their first camp. Haneen sat on his hunkers, listening impassively, but although we tried to include him in our conversation we got the impression that
he
spoke little English. He stirred life into the fire with a stick and added the few gnarled pieces of rotten wood we had gathered, and I felt that he resented our presence somehow. Occasionally, the shadowy shapes of bats swooped into the penumbral light of the fire and were gone again.

After a while Haneen left to sleep in the cab of the truck, but we sat on until the smouldering fire had died almost to nothing. For the first time, but not for the last, I had a sudden sense of the immensity that stretched out around me. For someone who had grown up trapped in a cleft between mountains and sea it was a giddy feeling, of lightness, of drifting weightlessly in an unfamiliar space. While Veronica chatted, I was barely conscious of her words, as I tried frantically to tether myself with some anchor of memory, some weight of past experience. All around me spun the malleable expanse of night, silent but for the call of some night bird, and then Veronica too felt the spell of the moment and we sat in silence until the final ember had dwindled into ash.

We woke at dawn, the coldness taking us by surprise and making us dress quickly. Straggly white tongues of mist laced the ground and licked round the wheels of the truck. Haneen was tinkering with the engine, wiping parts with an oily rag and cleaning some of the dust and dirt from the windscreen. We splashed a little water from a canister over hands and faces, and shared a bottled drink and some bread hardened by the journey. When we set off, we stretched our legs across the supplies and tried to doze, but our heads would jerk awake as we bumped over some pothole.

At first, the landscape repeated itself, sporadic pieces of cultivated land growing tawdry crops of sorghum or maize, a few thin herds of cattle grazing on scrub. Once we passed a burnt-out car. Then, after we had journeyed some miles south, we began to meet groups of people walking along the side of the road, their possessions wrapped in blankets and balanced precariously on their heads, some of the women with babies
strapped
to their backs. They trudged in single file through the rising heat, separated from each other by the burden of their solitary toil. Small children chided goats, punishing their dilatory wanderings with sticks. A few called out to us and held up their hands but the truck's wheels showered them with dust as we passed and when we tried to ask Haneen who they were and where they were going, he shrugged his shoulders and ignored us, hunching over the steering wheel and wiping sweat from his face with a rag. Peering out from the shadow of the truck, we sat unable either to ignore them or to acknowledge them.

Suddenly the truck's brakes were slammed on and we screeched to the side of the road with a violent, bumping swerve. Bits of machinery and packing cases tumbled across the truck, and I squealed in pain as a sharp metal edge cut my leg. Haneen was wrestling with the wheel and shouting wildly as we bounced off the road and into scrub before finally grinding to a halt. A thick cloud of dust billowed into the back, choking and blinding us, and then within a few seconds the tailboard was covered with children's hands as they pulled themselves up to see into the back. They came no further in but held on with one hand, the other stretched towards us as they filled the truck with a chorus of voices. Then there was the sound of Haneen's voice and he was wielding a long thin cane above their heads, striking some of them on the back until they released their hold and dropped to the ground. By now my leg was bleeding steadily, and one of the sacks of flour was punctured and flowing round our feet like sand.

The truck had swerved to avoid a makeshift barrier manned by a group of children, the oldest of whom was probably no more than ten or twelve. When we got out there was a smell of petrol and rubber, and tyretracks where we had braked and skidded across the scrub. Haneen swung his cane wildly when he saw any of the children encroaching and they clung together, cowering before its swish and sting as it sliced the air.
Martine
got out her medical kit and dressed my leg, thoroughly cleaning the cut with antiseptic. The children's eyes studied us curiously. One of them came forward, momentarily indifferent to the cane, and when Martine had finished, he touched her on the shoulder, pointed to the case and then gestured to where two or three adults sat in the little shade afforded by some box trees. As she stood up, Haneen shoved the boy away.