The Night Stages (5 page)

“There is a natural secretiveness in my family” – he had lifted his hand, making a point – “that is to say, a natural discretion.” He looked at her then and smiled, his face flushed. She had loved this in him, his shyness.

But in Kieran there had been a level of fearfulness added to this. “It was as if,” Niall said, “having found what he wanted, he felt anyone would try to take it from him.”

Niall had been preparing to leave and was standing, reaching for the jacket he had placed on the back of a chair when he had entered the cottage. Two empty glasses rested side by side near a half-finished bottle. She would drink the wine later, alone, after he had gone.

“He was out in the bog and up in those mountains in all seasons, any kind of weather. He afforded himself no protection.”

Niall had bent over and reached for Tam’s hand across the table.

“The girl I married had no links at all to a life like the one lived out in the country,” he said. “The smell of the turf and the animals would have put her off, I think. There was nothing in her life like that.”

“I’m glad you became a cyclist,” she said, looking at the bicycle that he had, as always, brought into her house and that he would soon walk to the door. She did not want to talk about his wife.

He had joined the Dublin Cycling Club on a whim while he was at university, he told her, and it had stuck. He had liked the long stretches of training, how there would sometimes be a full day of it, unlike the football practices that
would often be over in a couple of hours. “I was, I still am, the opposite of my father, never fully took to quiet times in the house.” He reddened again, as if suddenly realizing the irony of what he had said and where he had said it.

KIERAN HAD GONE QUITE WILLINGLY TO SCHOOL IN
the beginning, walking solemnly beside his older brother, under the shadow of the large church, past several pubs, the bank, the food stores, the hardware store. Other boys drifted down from the High Street and joined them at the tower house, so named because of its round wall and curved windows. He was able to see himself in the glass of those windows, the uniform too large for him and his socks crumpled at the ankles. Girls passed them as they moved toward the school, dressed in their own uniforms, heading for the convent at the opposite end of the town. His brother, Niall, so much taller, older, would turn toward the Upper School, leaving him alone but filled already with a clear knowledge of his differences.

He learned to read quickly, and with considerable enthusiasm –he was delighted by anything that included a story. Early mathematics, for example, that involved children with a limited amount of money being sent to a shop to buy a specific number of apples. These children were, to him, rich with the all-frightening and wonderful possibilities of drama, and how that drama would move through their lives – even at that early age he was aware of the branching of narrative. There would have been a house of many rooms attached to each of the children
who set off for the shop, and in those rooms there would be barely understood conversations taking place among adults wielding unequal degrees of power. He thought of the different voices his mother used when she spoke. How sometimes he couldn’t break through her preoccupation no matter what he said, and how that preoccupation was centred on something he felt he would never find. He knew that she had been a child once, and that there had been a whole lived childhood when she hadn’t known his father, hadn’t known his brother, Niall, or him. This fascinated and disturbed him.

The early years of his childhood had passed in a fairly orderly and ordinary manner. He formed friendships with a couple of other boys; the relationships mostly revolving around board games. He liked the progression of the men along the straight lines of the board, the suggestion of a journey being taken, and how the arbitrarily chosen card could change the course of things, the place where a marker stood. But he was indifferent about winning and confused by the disappointment he saw in others when they didn’t win a game. Group sports didn’t interest him at all. Out of doors he preferred to be alone, or to walk through the streets in the company of one silent dog that did not belong to him and whose name he did not know but who was almost always present and available.

He was contented enough. He and the dog had discovered that the streets of the town led to roads in the mountains, and he imagined that these roads led to other roads, other worlds. Inside his home or at the school it was always warm and dry. The prospect of his own discomfort had not yet
occurred to him, though he sensed the disquiet in his mother and, at certain times, in the way his father looked at his mother when she was sealed behind the wall of that unknowable preoccupation.

What is it, Deirdre? his father would ask softly. But she would shake her head and look away from him. She would not answer. No one in the house had ever heard her complain.

One day when he was about eight, Kieran had walked alone into the house after school. He had removed his wet shoes and had gone silently down the tiled hall, stopping by the parlour door when he heard a male voice that was only faintly familiar. Looking into the room he saw the profile of the town chemist outlined by the low afternoon light coming through the bay window. His mother sat in a chair near the window, one arm falling across her lap, the other bent, and her forehead resting in her open palm. The air of the room was liquid with dusk and both his mother and the chemist were caught in it, perhaps drowning. No one had lit a lamp. It was only when his mother spoke that the boy knew she had been weeping, was perhaps still weeping. “I know,” his mother said, “I know.”

“And it will always be so,” the man said. “And we can do nothing.”

The boy instinctively withdrew, walked backwards to the front door, opened it and closed it noisily, then waited for his mother to call to him as he knew she would. “Niall, Kieran,” she sang, “come into the parlour. Mister Keating is here and
he has brought your father’s Christmas gift … a new electric razor. But you mustn’t tell him.”

“It’s only me,” Kieran called back. “Niall’s at the football.” Then he ran over to the stairs and up to his room. There was something about the brass rods that fixed the carpet runner to the groin of each step that he would always remember in relation to this, and it put him off brass in any form, for life. He did not come down until dinnertime, when there was no one in the parlour at all.

After that he was aware of secrets and distances in the house. There was that thick, impenetrable air, and his father rarely talking but watching his mother closely.

His mother had become like an ocean to the boy, vast and unknowable, with faraway shorelines he could never see, could not even imagine from where he stood but that he nevertheless sensed were vivid and real. He could read his father’s helplessness yet nothing at all in his mother but an ocean, then waiting and indifference. When he was older, and she had been gone for many years, he would wonder if she had been waiting for her life to pass.

He had his first tantrum two weeks later in the midst of a class devoted to arithmetic. The children who had gone to the shops to buy a specific number of apples with a limited amount of money had been banished from the blackboard and from the page for a couple of years at this point and he had missed them, finding he had been unable to force himself
to care about the empty numbers that replaced them. When he asked about the disappearance of the stories, one of the Brothers who taught him had laughed out loud and had told him that he had discovered the difference between pure and applied mathematics. “You’re a right little philosopher, you are,” the man had said. But this compliment made no difference to Kieran. He could not find it in himself to care about addition and subtraction when it was detached and free-floating and only about itself. Soon he began to fall behind and there was no more laughter in the classroom.

One afternoon, while staring at a column he had made himself in his notebook, he felt something large and dark moving inside him, as if he had swallowed a sizable animal that was struggling to burst out of his body. Soon he found himself wondering where the noise was coming from, why his books were on the floor, his chair overturned, and his arms and legs moving in an aggressive manner. With his eyes closed he saw a collection of piercing beams almost exactly like the swords of blinding light that made him squint and turn away from the sea on a clear January day. He was small for his age and easily overtaken by the strength of the Brother, and in no time he found himself panting in the hall where he was told to stand for the remainder of the morning. An outburst, the Brother called it, and indeed Kieran himself was terrified by what had happened, what had burst out of him.

All that winter the house seemed to fold in on itself while the dark and the rain pressed up against the windows. Niall, who was now seventeen, had gone mad for Gaelic football and
was often not there after school, busy instead on a drenched field, in the company of a group of noisy teenaged boys of his own age and height. When he came home, it was as if he brought the fresh sea wind with him. This energized their father, who would talk then about the tournaments of times past in places as far away as Clare or even Donegal. This talk sometimes set off a tantrum in Kieran, though he wouldn’t have been able to say why. But even when he was at his worst, his mother would remain in her chair so that her husband and Niall, if he was home, would be required to deal with him.

Still, sometimes, on a Saturday or a Wednesday afternoon when there was no school, he would walk quietly beside his mother in the town so that he could help her carry whatever she bought at the food store or the butcher shop. Once or twice they went to the chemist to buy seltzers for his father’s indigestion or plasters for Niall, whose knees were often a mess because of the football. The man Kieran had seen in the parlour was courteous but unsmiling. Behind him was a collection of small wooden drawers, each one bearing an unpronounceable name,
Plumbacet, Capcisi, Ichthyoc
. Will that be all, Mrs. Riordan? he would say, solid in his white coat, handing a white paper bag to her over the counter. His mother said nothing. She put the payment beside the cash register, placed the package in Kieran’s hands, then turned toward the door. Once, the chemist had run after them, shouting, and Kieran’s heart had become huge and demanding in his chest, but the man had only wanted to give them change for the punt note his mother had left behind. The boy
saw the coins dropping from the man’s naked, freckled hand into his mother’s gloved palm. “Deirdre,” the chemist began, but she took Kieran by the shoulders, pointed him in the direction of home, and they both began to walk. He could hear the sound of the man’s footsteps then, becoming fainter and fainter, moving in the opposite direction.

Later his mother had prepared the evening meal in silence and had eaten next to none of it herself. His father and Niall discussed football. Kieran left his chair, went to his mother’s side, and placed his hand on her arm. Then, when she didn’t react, he tugged at her sleeve, which was silken and inert. Niall stopped talking to their father in mid-sentence and sent a hard look across the table to his younger brother. “Leave her,” he said. “Don’t pester her.” The whole room became silent, as if it had filled with water during the few moments the boy had been touching his mother. Kieran returned to his place and ate and drank everything he could in order to stun or drown the dark animal he could feel squirming inside him. He succeeded more or less. But, as he was nearing sleep, the foreign-looking names on the chemist’s drawers floated through his mind. The tantrum was pacing at the periphery of the rooms he walked through, and while he was sleeping it attached itself to a nightmare that catapulted him from his bed in the middle of the night.

Kieran had been to Valentia Island only once on a class expedition with Father O’Sullivan. The old bus on which he and
the other children rode had lumbered onto the ferry at Reenard Point a few miles out of the town and then had been driven sedately onto the island shore only ten minutes later. He had been delighted by the brief journey over the water and, released for a few moments from the bus, had run with the other boys back and forth across the deck.

Once they were on the island, the old priest had wanted the children to understand the geography they were passing through and the historical and religious significance of the spot they would be visiting. “One of the most westerly points of land in Europe,” he told them, swaying beside the driver at the front of the bouncing vehicle, “and St. Brendan himself departing from there in his skin boat. Glanleam,” he said vaguely, naming the places they passed by. “Gortgower, Coarha Beg.” The yellow wins were being replaced by bursts of hawthorn in the hedgerows. Now and then there was the startling pink of a rhododendron.

Each child had a relic to place at the Holy Well, where they would stop to pray, a saint’s medal from Lourdes or a small plastic statue of the Virgin. Kieran had only two coins in his pocket, his mother having forgotten to give him anything else, but he had seen the money pilgrims had left at grottos and he hoped that no one would notice his shame when he placed coins rather than tokens at the rim of the well.

The day was fine and the priest asked the driver to stop by the side of the road so that the company could walk the mile or two of green road heading for the coast. An almost indistinguishable ancient trackway crossed their path at one point, one
made so long ago the priest couldn’t say just when. Among the fields there were three or four abandoned houses with the thatch on them ruined and sagging and the glass in their windows gone altogether. “Off to America, I suppose,” the priest said, though no one had asked him. “Couldn’t make a go of it.”

After they had climbed over a stile at the end of the road, three stone crosses came into view, and the slabs surrounding the Holy Well beside them. The land tilted up from the spot, making a clean line against the sky and giving the impression that the earth was faintly unbalanced, awry.