The Night Stages (36 page)

Why did he think he was training for the Rás? Kieran wanted to know.

Hadn’t Michael Kirby himself told the man so. He’ll be in here for the gears, Kieran will, Kirby had apparently said, once he figures out that he has to have them, though God alone knows where he’ll get the money. In his opinion, the man continued, God himself had injured that trestle just so Kieran could work on it. “Get over there and start climbing. And tell them John Kelly from Killarney Cycles sent you. We’re counting on you here for the glory of the county.”

“I won’t join the team,” said Kieran. “I’ll be in it as an independent.”

“That may be,” John Kelly answered, “but if you win, the team will claim you in the end.”

Kieran liked the work on the trestle, the climbing, and the heaviness of the winching. With no fear of heights, he became almost immediately fond of hanging by a rope over the slow, muscular progression of the river, or of watching the same river develop opaque bars of light when the sun shone between the slats that held the rails in place. He could see the whole town from there, the mountain behind it where Susan’s house was, and he believed he could even pick out the shop window behind which he knew she would be standing at the counter, her head
bent or her face turned, perhaps, toward the light and the view that would include the trestle he stood on. Sometimes, if he held the shop window in his gaze long enough, he imagined he could see the little basket she had made with its one flower, still unsold, and on display, though he knew this was impossible.

Even when he had made enough money for the gears, he continued to work on the trestle. He was determined to stop eating the rabbits, and wanted to buy some meat from a butcher. Certainly he would need more cash for the months ahead when he would return to Gerry-Annie’s. It was a point of pride with him now that he would pay his own board, and he intended to buy a pair of boots for Annie, ones that he knew she wanted. They had fur around the ankles and were made of rubber so that her feet would remain dry on her walks in and out of town to clean for his father. There was a red umbrella as well that he had seen her eyeing in the window of Mary Margaret’s shop. He liked to think of her telling his father that it was he, Kieran, who had bought these items for her, and pictured how the old man would shake his head in amazement at what his son could provide.

The work was completed finally, and he and the other workers took down the scaffolding and collected their last pay packets from the temporary railway office that they then also dismantled. The Purple Hornet, beautifully fitted with its new gears, waited at the wall of the road, as alert as a dog in the presence of sheep and, to his mind, as full of anticipation of an important task about to be undertaken. It was November. There were only five more months before the Rás, and they
would be months of rain and storm; often he would be training, he knew, in the very teeth of the gales that would soon begin to cartwheel in from the Atlantic. At Christmas his brother would come again, home from Dublin, but he didn’t want to think about any of that, liking the notion of the girl alone with her father in the shop and then later in the evening with both her parents in the house above.

There would be the evening fires at Gerry-Annie’s for him, and food he had bought himself boiling over them. There would be the books that Kirby had given him to read and long sleeps taken in the hours of full blackness, night after night until the days came longer again and the Rás grew even nearer. He wanted the dark season, the company of Gerry-Annie, and the punishing rides through the calamitous weather. But first there was something he knew he had to do.

He had brought his only good shirt and one pair of decent shoes with him that last morning to the trestle, stopping by Gerry-Annie’s to collect them on his way to work. Annie said nothing about his absence, though he saw the look of relief on her face as he walked through the door. She wondered out loud if he was going to a funeral, as she had never known him to voluntarily take that shirt down from its hook on the wall. He smiled at that observation but didn’t explain. “Perhaps I’m thinking of going to Mass,” he joked.

“You could wait till the roof was slated before that would happen,” she said.

After he had finished work, he walked behind one of the abutments of the trestle and removed his boots and changed
his shirt. The shoes were a bit small, so he took off his socks as well, while light and shadow from the river simmered on the concrete he leaned against. His trousers were spattered with paint from the trestle and mud from the road, but he was hoping that only the top half of him would be observed, that and maybe a glimpse of the shoes as he entered. Once he was on the bicycle the shoes felt uncertain and slippery on the pedals, but despite this he was on the main street of the town in minutes.

He pushed the bicycle into a rack in front of the bank and walked beside the church until he came to the spot where he knew he must cross. Here he paused, trying to will his heart to stop beating so insistently, and wondering if he should turn back. There was the glass of the shop front, full now of silver and pearls, some of the jewellery hanging from black velvet, the rest positioned on the satin floor of the bay window. And then the small basket, the colour of cream, with its one mauve flower and the two perfect pale green leaves. He had come this far. He had taken the shirt from the hook on Gerry-Annie’s wall and put on his good shoes. To turn back now would be a kind of defeat, he told himself. So he walked in his uncomfortable shoes across the street, opened the door to what seemed to him to be a cacophony of bells, and entered the shop.

She looked up then and said his name with surprise. Her wonderful hair was pulled back and her face was lit on one side only by the sunlight coming in through the window. He could see her father at the rear of the store seated on a stool
and bent over something on a table under a strong light. The man looked briefly up at the sound of the bells, but soon turned his attention back to whatever he was examining.

“What brings you here?” Susan was asking, a pleasant, courteous tone in her voice.

Kieran wanted to tell her that she had brought him here, the thought of her strong in him night after night. “I’ve come from the trestle,” was all he could manage. “The work on it is finished.”

“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know you were working there above.”

“Yes,” he said. “One month now.”

“Niall never said in his letters.”

The mention of his brother troubled him, that and the sudden thought of letters between them. “Niall wouldn’t have known,” he said.

There was a display case in front of her, like a glass sepulchre from a fairy tale, and in it the bright stones of the rings looked harsh and significant. On top of it her two hands were nervously, yet almost imperceptibly, moving. Kieran felt that the silence between them was enormous and that he hadn’t the tools to break it. The ringing of the telephone at the back of the shop startled him, and then there was her father’s voice speaking about the time of a delivery.

“I’ve come for the basket,” Kieran said. He could hear the father, still talking in the back.

She glanced up at him, with a blank look that gradually moved toward comprehension. The cool courtesy left her
demeanour, and she became visibly shy, as if he had asked her a question so intimate it could not be answered.

Her father hung up the phone and the silence came again.

“My own basket?” she eventually asked, in a voice so soft Kieran could barely hear it.

“Yes,” he said, “in the window.”

She walked out from behind the glass counter and crossed to the front of the store, where she bent at the waist and reached into the light to grasp the small object. She returned with it in her hand, saying that it would be dusty from being on display for such a long time.

“I don’t mind,” he told her. His blood was booming in his ears. He could barely hear his own voice and was concerned that he might have spoken too loudly, might have even shouted. “It doesn’t matter,” he added as quietly as he could.

She returned to her place behind the counter and placed the basket on top of the display case. Then she took a thin piece of cardboard from what must have been a shelf near her feet, folded it into the shape of a box, and filled it with tissue paper that she also took from the same mysterious spot. As she placed the basket in the little nest she had made for it, her hands shook slightly. He would remember this trembling, and would interpret it over and over.

“What were you after from the window, Susie?” her father called from the back of the shop.

“It’s just my little basket,” she answered, “that Kieran here wants to buy.”

“He’ll be wanting that basket for a girl, I’d say,” the father said, laughing.

Kieran placed some money on the glass counter and Susan took it and offered him some change from the cash register.

“This is good, Susie,” the father called again. “Now you’ll have to be making another.”

“Would you like me to put a bow on it,” she asked Kieran, “if it is for a girl?”

“There is no girl,” he said quietly, “it’s for myself.” And then, with a great stab of courage, “It’s because of you.”

She looked at him quizzically, and he looked back at her for as long as he could bear it. Then, when he turned his face away, she did something astonishing. She put her hand briefly on his, where it rested on the box. “Thank you,” she whispered.

The bell that announced his departure from the shop rang in his mind all the way back into the hills. That and an after-image of her hands. The trembling. And then the warmth of the palm when she placed it over the roughness of his knuckles.

The following dawn he rode into the town with a card made from the basket’s box in his jacket pocket. On it he had pencilled a map of where he was hidden, above Derriana Lough. He had drawn small wavelets on the lake so that she would know it was water, and had written the word
stream
alongside the line he had made for the watercourse that joined the five
lakes. By the time he was making the road into the town he was running out of space and so he put an arrow there with the word
town
at the end of it in case she was confused. Then he turned the cardboard over and, having no envelope, wrote her name on the back of it. In the middle of the map he had printed the word
please
, just that,
please
, but had then thought better of this, and had tried to erase it with the dried-out rubber at the end of his pencil. The result was an unsightly smudge covering the word
please
, which was still visible if one looked closely enough. He drew a line through the word, as if to cancel such an audacious request, but in the end this looked too severe to him, almost discourteous, and when he tried to erase the line, he made a hole in the cardboard and cursed himself for doing so. A messy job all in all, and slipping it under the door of the jewellery shop was a great and terrifying risk, but one he knew he could not prevent himself from taking. He had been warning himself against it all night long. But by the first light he had lost the argument.

It was his last week at the hut, and the loss of it would now be magnified by the fact that it had become the only place where he could imagine her coming to him. Donal’s story all those years ago, the poem he had said on the mountain under the stars, had bitten deep into Kieran.
I came unto him / the sheep were gathered by him
. Over and over again since that night, his mind had painted the picture of a girl climbing a slope toward him with a whole valley behind her and the sea beyond. Her eyes would be down on the path until she saw him, and her stride would be measured and purposeful. It had always been
like that, he decided. Even before he knew Susan, he had had a thousand prompts for the moment.

When he caught first sight of her early on his last Sunday afternoon in the place, his heart recognized the picture she made stepping from rock to rock on the edge of Wattle Lake. Even though she had not yet reached him, it was as if they were old lovers now, with just a faint shyness, like ripples in the water, and the rest of it calm, reflective. There would be little talk between them, he knew, and there would be no resolution. He would have to search for her over and over again. All through his life there would be this distance. But now, where he stood, with two lakes between them, he could see her coming closer and closer.

He waited until she had reached the Lake of the Dreaming and had raised her eyes to his. Then he moved toward her. “Come here to me,” he said.

S
he has slept again, this time lying full out on a banquette. The faux-leather upholstery is stuck to her cheek on this third morning so that she feels she is peeling a part of herself from the surface as she rises to a seated position. She had succumbed to the bar in the evening, along with a few other Irish passengers, and in their company she had drunk a full bottle of wine so that she is now thirsty and disorientated. She hadn’t gone to the hotel. Remembering a tale about Ferry Command, how the crew of the first transatlantic aircraft during the war had spent their Gander nights in a railcar on a siding near the runway, she had felt that succumbing to a real bed in a comfortable room would be, in some mysterious way, an admission of defeat. But now she has to admit she longs for a bath: the immersion and the heat.