The Night Stages (24 page)

Harding stood now and put on his overcoat. Then he sat down again. Kenneth zipped up his own jacket, which he had never taken off. He realized he’d been poised for flight ever since they entered the bar. Harding placed his hands on the arms of his chair as if to rise again, but then he hesitated. “Over the years,” he said, “I’ve wondered if I dissolved for her as thoroughly as she dissolved for me. I expect that’s likely the case. And perhaps that’s what she wanted all along. Maybe she wanted something that would simply cancel me out. She had handed everything that we were together to her husband, all the power of that. And as I said, when they – no, he – when he erased Gentleman, and her, he erased me.” He stood again and tied his plaid scarf around his neck. “And perhaps – it
certainly looked that way to me that night – perhaps that’s what she always wanted.”

More than a decade later, working on the Gander mural, Kenneth held Harding in his mind, a constant presence and a necessary absence. Even what the teacher had taught him, about the distribution of lights and darks, about weighting and composition, had to be remembered and then discarded by him. The piece would explore speed and stasis without ever coming down on the side of one or the other, without making judgments. It would only be the children who would hold an opinion and it would be an opinion so mysterious it might simply be a certainty about the persistence of mystery. Wisdom without judgment.

R
oads had become everything to Kieran.

There were the roads leading to the town and they had their own enchantments. On them he would see cottages inhabited by those he felt now were his own people, those who worked every day on the land and who rose before dawn on Wednesdays to take animals to the market. Sometimes very early he would come upon the odd hermit, who had night-walked down into the town to drink in a public house and was now sleeping under a hedgerow in the first light, fuchsia hanging above him like drops of sacred blood, a stone for a pillow.

There were other roads that coaxed his bicycle into the mountains: green roads flanked by deserted villages or villages where a single old woman held stubbornly on, with one cow, dependent on a son or nephew to call up to her to replace a rusted gutter, or to deliver supplies of flour, turf, and tea, her whole world one of memories, ghosts, and weather. In her would be the names of places where people had not lived for
generations and the sense of ancient bones, those of the victims of the famine, and those of the old monks who chose solitude in such isolated locations. There was one old woman who told Kieran she was the keeper of the nearby Killeen, an ancient burial place for unbaptized children. It was situated in the stony, sloping field next to her cottage and she had come, over the years, to believe that the lumpy ground of the place owned her in some important way. Slowly, slowly, she told Kieran, she was giving names to the unnamed children who slept there, and gradually they had come to her to tell her the ways in which they had died. One at time they came to her, she said, “in all their beauty.” She had rocked them in her arms. She had sung lullabies to them, and sometimes, they had sung back to her, melodies so pure only the Old Ones could receive them. By this he knew she was one of the Old Ones. And he was not. “Be careful of my babies,” she called to him as he cycled away, past the Killeen. “Don’t startle their sleep.”

And then there were the roads that led to the headlands: Bray Head, Hog’s Head, and Bolus. It was at the opening to the latter that he met the poet of the peninsula – “the one essential teacher that we all need and that some of us are lucky enough to find,” Niall had said to Tam when he spoke to her about this. It was McWilliams for him, he told her, and a man called Michael Kirby for his brother.

Kieran had cycled on a road that seemed to be a funnel of gravity into the village of Ballinskelligs faster than even he would
have thought possible, crashing down the potholed road from Killeen Leagh, over the main road and then onto a smaller road beside what had been a modest landlord’s demesne, its stone wall slipping by his shoulder smooth as a long grey eel. Behind that wall, Annie had told him, was a man in a small, new cottage, one who was using the burnt-out manor house as a barn for his tractor. Gerry and his mountain-talking mates, she confided, had burnt that house, and she had a terrible aversion to it as a result, and had forbidden Kieran to do even as much as look over the wall for fear of reprisal. “But
I
didn’t burn the house, Annie,” he had said to her reasonably enough. “The Black and Tans don’t ask you that when they come to get you,” she had replied. “But there are no more of them here now,” he had told her, only to be greeted with a look indicating that the innocent of the earth rarely go unpunished.

But, notwithstanding his curiosity, he sped by the entrance on this late September morning, in love with his own need to cover ground. He might have turned down to the Tra, the beach that extended for miles at this point and that was made of sand hard enough that horses could be ridden on it and bicycles could travel smoothly over it, but it was the road and the land he wanted on this day, not the water.

There was a light fog gathering that thickened as he crossed a bog, so that when Kieran flew through the hamlet of Dungegan, the houses were softened by mist. Two miles later, entering the quiet townland of Ballinskelligs, he came to a halt at a nest of narrow tracks. He wanted to be out at the very end of things, the limits of the headland, but it was
unclear how he was to proceed, so he stopped and, still straddling the bicycle, lit a cigarette – a new and secret pleasure –and wondered why he had never come here before. The girl stepped back into his mind, but he pushed her image away. She came to him again, however, and he heard himself whisper her name, in a prayerful kind of way. He was immediately embarrassed by this, as if his brother or his father, or worse, the girl herself, might have heard, and he turned his attention forcibly to the decision before him.

He knew about the road that rose above the cliffs and skirted the headland, so he determined to follow the track that curved up into the haze, and had placed one foot on the pedal when he heard a male voice behind him. “I’d have that bicycle for myself,” the voice said, “if you weren’t so obviously fond of it.” Kieran turned to see a very tall, dark-haired figure approaching him.

The man was broad-shouldered, with long, muscular arms. His carriage was straight and slim, almost graceful, but even his most casual movements suggested an extreme physical strength, a deliberate sort of energy, which was startling on such a soft day. He wore a blue jumper, which matched his eyes, one that was knitted in a traditional pattern common to the region. On his feet was a pair of large, well-worn, but still firmly intact leather boots. His hand when he offered it was rough and clean. “Michael Kirby,” the man said.

Kieran threw his cigarette on the ground, uncomfortable suddenly about having been caught with it in his hand. The man scooped it up, placed it between his lips, and drew deeply
on it. “Ah, tobacco,” he said, “I gave it up over a decade ago. That which one has abandoned always tastes sweeter.” He dropped the cigarette and crushed it under his boot. “I know who you are and have been expecting you. Did Davey tell you about me?”

“No,” said Kieran tentatively, “he did not.”

“Well, he told me a great deal about you.”

Kieran was taken aback by this. He had seen the tailor only infrequently, but once recently, all right, when it was clear that his coat sleeves hung only to his elbows and that a new garment was a necessity. I thought I was supposed to be buried in this thing, he had said to Annie while he attempted unsuccessfully to pull the two sides of it across his expanded ribcage. She allowed that she was appalled by the extent to which he had grown and had sent him off alone on the bicycle to visit the tailor’s house.

“He said quite a lot about wheels,” the man continued, “and a not inconsiderable amount about velocity as well. And here you are, with two wheels under you, though not as much velocity as I had anticipated.” Mr. Kirby settled himself down on the nearby stone wall. “I suppose the velocity will come to you like. You are built for it, I’d say.” He looked Kieran over. “Small and wiry.”

Kieran smarted at the word
small
. He was already eighteen and hadn’t grown as much as he’d wanted.

“You may still grow perpendicularly,” Kirby said, as if reading Kieran’s mind. “But you are far too high-strung to grow horizontally. I myself grew, perpendicularly, six more
inches after the age of eighteen. My mother had to give me regular doses of onion syrup to slow the growing down or who knows where it might have ended.”

Kieran smiled, taking hope from the story.

Kirby continued, “I am a fisherman and, as a result, I have four hundred and twenty-three different kinds of skies in my head.” He tapped his skull for effect. “And I am a poet … but only when I am thinking in Irish. When I am thinking in English I am a fisherman and a painter, though admittedly I have not painted anything yet. I will, however, and when I do, I will paint all those skies.”

“You have that many,” Kieran said.

“All decent fishermen have those skies,” Kirby assured him, “because of survival. The skies not only tell you what the weather is … they tell you what it will be and that, my friend, is much more important. I would recommend that you gather at least a hundred or so skies yourself because of the bicycle, on which, I predict, you are going to be spending the majority of your time in the next years. One thing those skies have taught me is the value of accurate prediction. I’d have been fish food if it weren’t for them. I also have predicted that, although I will desperately want to do so, once I become a painter, I will never paint a nude. Wouldn’t you love to paint a nude?”

Kieran was uncertain how to answer this shockingly exciting question. He had never let his imagination roam beyond Susan’s yellow blouse and the cloud of her hair. Well, that wasn’t quite true, but …

“As for the bicycle, I would recommend that you start training in earnest. You should begin with your mind because you are going to need it more than you know. Next Thursday, which the skies tell me will be calm and bright, I will take you out to the Skelligs. You must spend two days out there, alone in a beehive hut, without the bicycle. This will be your starting point. What do you know about the Skelligs?”

Kieran had learned in the school that the Skelligs was the name of the two sacred islands that he had seen rising from the sea a few miles off the end of the peninsula. The master had said that in the sixth century there had been holy men out there living a sparse life in corbelled huts on one of the islands’ tallest peaks. Cycling near the shore, Kieran had seen the islands and each time they had looked like formations entirely different from the ones he had seen a few days or a few weeks before.

“There were monks …” Kieran offered.

“Not only monks.” Kirby waved the holy men away with his hand for the time being. “Absolutely terrible weather, the sea, the birds of the sea, and down at the edge, the fish of the sea, stones, beehive huts, an oratory, a burial ground, one donkey, which is the only thing you will be riding as there are absolutely no bicycles. And this donkey has been dead for thirteen centuries, so for you it will be the donkey of the imagination. You will be riding the donkey of the imagination, a very good donkey to ride, I’d say.”

“I’m not sure I can go.”

“And when I say absolutely terrible weather, I mean terrible in the true sense of the word. Awe-inspiring weather! Great
bolts of sun slicing through the clouds, rains that drown, winds that roar and shake the island from within, impenetrable fog – not like this fog” – Kirby swung his arm in the direction Kieran intended to go – “but fog that blinds and deafens and causes that stillness that is the true beginning of velocity, followed by the kind of clarity that causes you to wince.”

“I might have to work that day, in town.”

“Your father should have completed his training out on Skellig Michael, but I fear he did not. But that man he works with, McWilliams, he knew enough to go out there now and then.”

Had his father ever been out to this island? Kieran did not know.

“We must respect the weather station, though,” said Kirby, his mind having moved for a moment away from the islands to the shore. “They have those extraordinary balloons that go places we can’t go – except on the donkey of the imagination, of course – and see things we cannot see. And then there is McWilliams, who as far as I’ve heard knows everything about everything. They say he knows about poetry, they say he knows about painting, but that he is completely disinterested in these things unless they relate to weather. And then your own father, who works there, and his extraordinary punctuality. It was him, thirty years ago during the time of the shooting, it was him who had the courage to walk out to the balloon house and to set the balloon free while the fighting was going on in the street above. Such a young man at the time, as well, just starting.” Kirby
sighed, as if mourning the young man that Kieran’s father had once been.