The Night Stages (28 page)

Years later Kenneth would place this young man at the centre of the mural, his idea of him having so firmly fused with the image of the soccer celebrant that, as he painted, he forgot altogether that he had never really known if this were so. He clothed him in white satin, transforming him into an Atlas, pinned by his own weight to the ground, yet absorbed by the sky and holding a white banner pierced by metallic, streamlined, bird-machines. Kenneth would never be able to say whether this central figure was attempting to invent
flight, or signalling to those who already had. His virility would be earthbound, yet he and the sail would summon the ether. Just behind this Titan’s right ankle Kenneth placed the girl, a shadowed doll, an annulled memory. She would be almost but not quite unnoticeable. She would hold all of the sorrow in the picture in her small, nervous hands while her partner, unknowingly, waved the white drapery of surrender.

KIERAN BECAME WHAT KIRBY CALLED A SWIFT
terror on the bicycle and could, with ease, meet Kirby by the Ballinskelligs pier in the morning, receive instructions, ride over the now very familiar pass of Ballagh Oisin, fifteen miles from the sea, through Killorglin, over the Laune River, thence to Tralee, a further fifteen miles, then all around the dozens of miles of the Dingle Peninsula, ascending and descending Brandon Mountain, speeding along the coast to Bray Head, over to Dingle Town, back through Castlemaine, then along the extraordinarily beautiful coast of his own Iveragh, sailing at dusk down to the pier – sometimes with his feet arrogantly placed on the handle grips – where Kirby would be standing, watch in hand.

Good, Kirby would say, but not good enough.

On one of these days Kieran arrived five minutes early and Kirby allowed that he was impressed. “But not overly impressed,” he said, raising one hand in a cautionary manner, “not impressed enough. There is something we need to talk about. Tell me everything you know about potholes,” he said.

Two months before, Kieran had blown a tire when he encountered a pothole on the flat stretch of bog that provided an otherwise leisurely and joyful ride through inviting open
country after the effort of Ballagh Oisin. “There’s that devil of a one after the pass,” he said.

“Ah yes,” said Kirby, “Oisin’s pothole, and a legendary one at that. You are aware, I dare say, that that pothole was what conveyed Oisin to the land of Tir Na Nog. They say if you fall right into that one there is nothing for it but to be gone for three hundred years. A very dangerous pothole indeed but not dangerous now for you as you know it is there, which, apparently, Oisin did not. Still, there are potholes all over this island and you must become intimate with them all before you join the Rás.”

This was impossible and Kieran knew it.

“This is impossible, you will say to me,” Kirby continued, “but let me remind you that intimacy comes in many different forms. Think of women. I am of the opinion that we may be at our most intimate stage with them when we have not yet even spoken to them, when we are still riding the donkey of the imagination, though headed, admittedly, in their direction.”

The girl flared up in Kieran’s mind. He remembered that when he was looking through the window, he could see the way the sun touched her long eyelashes. He recalled the faint blue shadow at her temple and the slight rise of her upper lip. There was one intriguing mole just above her collarbone. “Yes?” he said uncertainly.

“The future,” Kirby continued, “is the geography with which we are sometimes most intimate, having gone over every version of it inch by inch in our minds. We spend inordinate amounts of time anticipating it, picturing it, trying to control it,
measuring it, taking it apart and reassembling it. When we are preparing food, we are preparing for the future. When we are travelling, we are travelling into the future. When we wake in the morning, we step onto the floor and into the future. When I begin to compose a poem, I do so because in the future, I imagine, there will be this wonderful poem. When I look at the sky, I do so because of future weather. Prediction is one of our most natural states of intimate concentration; it is our conversation – our argument, on occasion – with the future. Look at those men like your father up there at the weather station arguing with the future. You must learn to predict potholes beyond the legendary potholes, the one you already know and others I will tell you about. Do you have a pencil and a piece of paper?”

Kieran did not.

“Then we must go up to my house to get one, because you will need to take some notes.”

Kirby stood in the parlour. The importance of the lecture, he said, merited such formal surroundings. He told Kieran about the potholes of County Tipperary, the specifics of potholes on roads that ran by the rivers of Clare. Potholes in bog country, he explained, were of an entirely different nature; deeper, and more likely to shift from one day to the next. “Shape-changers,” he said. He spoke of the angry potholes of County Galway with their mouths of stone. Be wary, he warned, of the deceptive potholes of County Dublin. “They
have macadamized roads there,” he said, “and because of this, a rider can become too confident of a smooth surface.” In County Cork, he confided, they have every kind of pothole that God can create. Those Cork holes, he maintained, were the kind of potholes that lay in wait for you like dogs hiding in a bush near the ends of lanes they are bound and determined to protect. “You never see them,” he warned, “until they catch you by the pant leg.” He could not speak about the North, he said, they being British potholes, but Kieran should be cautious indeed around that territory. “They have potholes, I’d say, like landmines, up there, veritable craters waiting for a cyclist from the south.”

The idea of the North was not something Kieran had thought about. “Surely,” he said, “the Rás would not really go there, would it?”

It had been a particular point of honour, Kirby insisted, for the Rás to penetrate the border at some time or another on one of the northern stages. During the inaugural Rás, he reminded him, the boys had carried the Irish flag with them, weaving in and out, through the six counties, and there had been much comment upon it by Orangemen and the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Quite a fracas had ensued, and these detours had been discouraged since.

Kirby rose from his chair after the pothole lecture and walked toward one of the two shelves of books on either side of the hearth. “This,” he said, handing a dark leather volume to Kieran, “is what you must read to understand the formation and persistence of potholes.”

Kieran looked at the spine.
Geology of Ireland
, it read.

“Different rocks, different soils, give birth to varying potholes. Know what’s under you when you are riding. Remember the Ice Age, that fractional inching forward of everything you think is stable. Learn how water affects what’s under you. And never forget: everything, even hard stone, is moving slightly at all times.” The truth was, Kirby insisted, you could count on absolutely nothing. What began as a barely noticeable crack could blossom overnight into a gigantic sink hole that could swallow you and your bicycle in one gulp.

Kieran hadn’t wanted to mention the irrefutable fact that he had never once seen Kirby on a bicycle, had never even heard of him riding at any time, but he couldn’t help himself. “How do you know all this?” he asked now. “Have you ridden on these roads?”

Kirby looked surprised. “Of course not,” he said, “I am a fisherman. The only things I have ridden are the waves.”

“So how do you know then?”

Kirby looked out the window of his house and up the road that climbed to Bolus Head. “The donkey of the imagination,” he said, “can travel anywhere.” Then he began to recite. “To a Pothole,” he began,

A few days later, when a late-afternoon mist slid down the mountain and crept up to the windows, Kieran decided he would ask Gerry-Annie about Tadhg, having been too uncertain of what he had seen to bring the subject to Michael Kirby’s attention. The way the old couple had emerged from the fog, the feeling of sorrow attached to them, and his own sudden strength in relation to the impassable gate – all of this was still vivid in his mind.

“Do you know one called Tadhg out on Bolus?” he asked her.

“I do, Kieran. I did.” She was sitting by the hearth in a wooden chair with arms. It had a cushion on the seat and at the back, and arms on the sides, and was considered by her to be the height of luxury. The furniture in the room, all made out back by Gerry’s own grandfather, was dark around them, and concrete under their feet approached and withdrew depending upon the strength of the fire. “He, and Sheila, whom he married,” Annie continued. “They were people my
own parents knew well. She died first, you know, and then him a year or so later. It was said he was found seated at the table with a knife and fork in his hands and no life in him. My mother said he was a terrible one for the food, always wanting something to eat at any time of the day or night. And then cautious about the fire, only allowing two or three pieces of turf a day – even in cold weather. He was always afraid,” Annie told Kieran, “that his turf stack wouldn’t last the winter, but he’d eat all the food in the house until there was nothing left and nowhere to get more.”

“So they are dead.” Kieran tried to run this fact through his mind.

“Yes, dead a good while, I’d say.”

“But I opened a hard gate for them. They wanted it opened and I did that.”

Annie sighed. “You would of course,” she said, unsurprised. “You are a good boy and you would do that for them. You would have to let Tadhg into a field, as he was so fond of his cows.” She pushed a strand of grey hair behind one ear, then folded her hands in her lap. “He was a great one for advice when he was alive, particularly on the subjects of grass and how to make a green field for the grass of two cows when it had all gone to rushes and furze and gorse. Oh, the fields Tadhg had! So ancient you couldn’t say what manner of man had built the walls. Not a corner on the lot of them. All sort of round, or like the shape of that platter.” She pointed to an oval of blue and white perched atop the dresser. “And the names on those fields:
Watery Meadow, The Slope of the Lightning, Swift Dog
Field, The Field of the Flying Cow
. I suppose those fields are there yet.” She paused. “Are you listening to me, Kieran?”

He moved his chair and it made a scraping noise. An affirmative sound came out of his mouth, but he wasn’t listening. Not really. He was thinking about the day of the gathering, the day of the scattering. He was trying to fit his mind into a thin place where Tadhg and his wife would be alive and dead at the same time, holding on to the day of the gathering for an unimaginable amount of time. Perhaps they had clung to the day of the gathering for so long the entrance to the fair was denied to them. Had he done them a favour when he had smashed open that rusted bolt? He remembered as well that the mist that enveloped them as they moved out toward the edge was bone-coloured, not the same white mist he had ridden through to get to the spot.
The day of the fair is nothing but a thin ghost announcing the day of the scattering
. He remembered Tadhg saying that.
The day of the scattering
could only mean the end of everything.

“Oh, and I recall now the names of some fields Gerry’s father had,” Annie said. “
The Hollow of the Little Saints, The Bed of the Lost Girl, The Haggard
 …”

“Who was she,” he asked, “this lost girl?”

Annie thought a while. “Someone from far-off, I think they said.” A piece of burnt turf fell softly through the grate and flame sprang from the place where it broke. “She had walked a long, long way, perhaps running from something, or maybe just one who had lost her way, and she lay down, I expect, to die in that field.”

“And Gerry knew her then.” Kieran was picturing this lost girl. She was ancient and alive at the same time.

“No he did not. Nor his father, or his grandfather. She came from another time. A time before.”

How beautiful that would have been, Kieran thought, a girl lying spent and pale with the green grass around her, her hair a dark cloud beneath her head, and the sound of the flocks coming across the fields in the evening. All strength gone and only submission left behind. He would have caught her on the edge of that and coaxed her back. Come here to me, he would have whispered, lifting her in his arms. Or he would have lain with her until his warmth bled into her and she opened her liquid eyes. It was Niall’s girl he was thinking of. She was the one he saw in his mind lying in that field. He would nurse her back with milk, as though she were an infant.

That night he dreamt of Susan again as he had done on other nights since he had seen her. Sometimes in these dreams, though she had been herself, she had spoken with his mother’s own voice, admonishing him for not answering her call or for letting his attention drift. But this time she was like the girl who had come to Donal in the mountains, the girl whom Donal had lost to Africa. There was a river of sheep moving around her and flowing down the slope, and the stars were as strong as they had been on the night Donal had spoken of his own lost girl. Her skin was pure and glowing in an apparent absence of light, and grace was everywhere.