Chapter 4 #18
He is just about to give up and go into the tenement to seek her there when he hears the timbre of a particular voice—clear and melodic, rising conspicuously above the singing of others, accompanied by the inevitable slap of a wet coir rope on cobbles.
“Stands the lady on the mountain, who she is we do not know, all she wants is gold and silver, and a man to—”
Enda’s favourite skipping song. Liam’s head snaps around, and there she is, at the other end of the street, his sister, inside the blurred orbit of the rope, the shape of which contains her like a house or the innards of a whale, and she a leaping Jonah, feet flying, pigtails jouncing on her shoulders.
Above her is a great mass of piled cloud, stately as a galleon, passing over the tiled roofs.
Despite himself, despite everything, Liam smiles, flooded with the feeling he has had all his life: that whenever Enda is near, everything will turn out well.
He cannot help himself. He sets off at a run, calling her name, and the sound of it makes her falter in her leaping, makes the song stutter then cease, the wet rope come to a smacking stop against Enda’s leg.
She stands there, among the other murmuring girls, regarding him, her chest heaving, her hands on her hips, skinny elbows pointing outwards, as if considering how she feels about his return.
Liam swallows. Is Enda angry with him? Should he not have yelled her name and ruined her game?
To his immense relief, he sees Enda’s face break into a smile, and she murmurs, almost to herself: “Li.”
She hops over the rope, lying on the cobbles now like an inscribed letter, and tilting her head sideways, in such a way that means he should follow, she sets off at a sprint towards the end of the street, and Liam falls in beside her, and they run together, towards a brick wall that separates the Lanes from a small patch of scrubland.
Enda does not let a thing like a wall get in her way: she makes a leap and hauls herself onto it.
Liam has no choice but to follow. It takes him three attempts to find a foothold, but he manages it eventually.
Enda balances her way along the top of the wall, but Liam cannot pull this off; she waits with patient forbearance at the end while he shunts his way along on all fours.
She drops down to the other side, into a thicket of bushes. By the time Liam joins her, among the waxy-skinned laurel stalks, she is cross-legged, examining a scab on her shin.
“So,” she says, with studied nonchalance, as if the answer is nothing to her, and he is reminded of how jealous she was that he went on the trip, not her, “how was it?”
Liam, still panting from the exertion of the climb, shrugs. “It was…”
His speech suddenly collapses in on itself like rotten floorboards. He gulps for air, for steadiness, gripping a branch.
Enda looks up, piercing him with her gaze.
Her eyes are said to be blue but Liam thinks that, like their owner, they are more complex than that.
They remind him of nothing so much as the sea: shifting, indistinct myriad shades, green in some lights and azure in others.
Inside the half-light of their secret den, they are the dark turquoise of deep, dangerous waters.
She watches closely now as, on an overwhelming impulse, he delves about in his pocket, extracts the pebble his father gave him, the one with a hole, which came from the well, and he flings it from him, into the bushes, just to be rid of it, to put the whole episode, and that dreadful place, behind him.
Enda frowns, watching to see where the pebble falls. “What?” she whispers, as if she knows already that his reply will contain secrets. “What is it?”
She reaches out a hand—grimy, with a tidemark of what looks like mud crossing her palm—but she doesn’t take his or give a comforting caress, which is not her way. She flicks him on the bare knee with a finger. “Tell,” she says.
Liam scratches his nose, which is prickling as if he might cry, and wonders how to begin: the redcoats, the priest, the widow’s house, the two hillocks, the odd little graves, their father in his garrulousness or bound to a table or reduced to a silent husk of a man.
At what point does this story start? Where are its edges, its boundaries?
“There was a copse,” he blurts, “and—”
“A corpse?” Enda straightens up, thrilled.
“Copse,” he repeats, and sees that Enda isn’t familiar with the word, but she will never admit to it, so amends it to “a little group of trees.”
“Oh,” Enda says, with palpable disappointment. “And?”
“Well, Da went in there and when he came out,” Liam says, already aware that his account sounds hollow, will fail to impress his listener, but how is he to communicate what happened back there, how can he explain? “He was…he was…”
“He was what?”
“Different.”
There follows for these three children a confusing time.
Liam gives to his mother the money he has carried back from the peninsula and watches as she tips it into her hand, looks carefully over the coins, then counts it out into two piles: the larger one to clear what they owe, the lesser one to put by in case of lean times, as she likes to say.
These coins are put into a stitched pouch and hidden behind the flour bin.
That done, she collects up the first pile of coins, ties her shawl in a firm knot and goes out, first to the rent-man and then to pay off their accounts at the grocers.
When she returns, with promising parcels under her arms, she smiles at them all, but Enda and Liam observe that she has not returned with rashers, jam, sugar and eggs, as they had hoped, just some milk and butter.
They glance at each other, then away, both gleaning that the money from the redcoats hasn’t been quite enough to ease their mother’s anxiety about how they will manage.
More worryingly, their father lies in bed, a felled oak, under all the blankets they own.
Curled into himself, face to the wall, he is silent all the day long.
At night, however, he wakes them, over and over again, with wild thrashing about, his muttering and yelling—about swine and ghosts, stones, and something about a wooden spoon—making Rose cry, the neighbours hammer furiously on the wall, and Enda get up to pace about the room.
He is ill, their mother tells them, he can’t help it, God love him, and they repeat these sentences to people who enquire, to anyone who knocks on their door.
When the other inhabitants of the tenements ask the children what ails their father, what is the name of his sickness, they do not know what to say.
A fever, their mother tells them one morning. She quickly amends this, that same afternoon, to “a distemper.”
Rose says the new word to herself as she arranges her doll and its bedding on the pavement, tasting its syllables, trying out different emphases: dis-tem-per, dis-temper, distem-per, distemper.
She cannot penetrate its meaning. Temper, she thinks, as she tucks sacking over her doll’s cloth limbs, is a bad thing, something that might bring punishment on your head, especially at school.
It is something that comes in “fits” and “outbursts”; a child must learn to control it; it makes a person feel hot and suffocated, as if their chest is filled with smoking coals.
But last night, when Rose had tiptoed to the bed where their father lay, he didn’t seem to be suffering from anything like that.
How could this be the same gibbering terror who tore about and yelled in the night?
He was utterly still, a person carved from stone.
A new scraggly beard covered his lower face; his eyes flickered back and forth under their lids; as Rose had watched, she saw a line of water seeping from the side of them.
It was not so much tears as a slow leak, as if tiny streams were flowing out of her father, down his temples and into his hair, and Rose had lifted the hem of her pinafore and wiped them away.
As she sits on the edge of the pavement with her slumbering doll, her feet in the gutter, she takes the hem of her pinafore and holds it up to the light. She can see that the water from her father’s eyes has left a stain, near the seam, shaped like a small island.
Rose lets her hem drop. She looks up the street, she looks down.
A grey and chill day it is. No sign of Enda or Liam, only a couple of boys across the way, hurling around a ball made of rags knotted around a stone.
As she watches the arc of the ball, hears the shouts and exhortations of the boys, the knowledge that something unusual, something unaccountable is happening in her house spreads through her, like damp through a wall, leaving a trail of blackened spores in its wake.
In the ensuing days, however, Rose is the only one of the children who will go near Tomás.
Enda comes back from school and goes straight out again.
Liam, by contrast, tries to avoid going anywhere.
He finds he needs to stay close to the house, to Rose, to his father, to his mother.
What if something were to befall them all while he was gone?
Who would defend a sick man, a pregnant woman, a small child, if not him?
He tells his mother he can’t go to school because he has a stomach ache or a sore leg. His mother lets him stay at home for a day, then two, but on the third day, she shakes her head and says, in a gentle voice, “Back to school with you today, Liam.”
“But, Mammy—”
“You’ll fall behind on your lessons, so you will.”
“—I have this awful pain.”
“Where?”
“In my…” he glances at his father, lying on the bed “…my head?”