On the Edge of the Loch: A Psychological Novel set in Ireland (2 page)

Already, five months had passed since he stumbled out to face a new world. Now, washing cars in corporate parking lots and writing a weekly column on schools-soccer for the
Arizona News Sentinel
, Tony MacNeill allowed himself to believe he was forging a new sanity. Each morning he re-fired his determination and replayed the wisdom of prison psychologist Joel Vida. Neither the forces that had derailed him at fourteen, nor the survival code that had sustained him through incarceration, were any longer relevant.

Eva Kohler had helped, initially on his release by renting him a room in her boarding house. And then her influence within her pool of intimates had landed him a half-dozen minimum-wage jobs, all brief stepping stones. From the beginning, tuning out her flaunting of her on-going affairs had caused him only slight discomfort. Of late though, that had changed. Now it was the things she said, how she looked at him, how she touched and brushed too close, that increased his isolation. Yet, as his confidence built he was biding his time, stashing away fives and tens for the day when he’d high-wire away. For he accepted now that he had paid in full for his sins, those for which he could atone. It was time to stop paying. No ghosts, no guilt, he swore, and no parole terms, would keep him imprisoned. Or keep the prison in him.

Each passing day, in his solitudes, his mind abandoned the Arizona desert for something he’d once had, a boyhood, with badges to prove it: playground woods and endless fields, the rhapsody of rivers and streams, the tiny home where he was always safe and its scorching turf fires. A time when he belonged. When he wished for no more than to live in each breath. When he knew who he was. When who he was was never a question. When days were escapades and sleep simply interludes.

Could he regain such peace, he needed to know, belong again to something, to someone? His vow was solemn, to find out if his soul might still be alive in Ireland, place of his only remembered comfort. Anthony Xavier MacNeill, the self he was meant to be, was anything left of it? Had the boy survived exile? All that had happened on the unforgiving streets? And what of the cost of nine years penal servitude and everything it entailed? Could he, this still obsessive ex-convict he had somehow become, resurrect the spirit that had once been his?

Soon he’d find out. Thirteen years after watching its green pastures fade into mist he’d go back for the first time, a short visit made possible by just two people still with faith in him.

He could ask nothing of the world, he accepted that, only of himself. If the gods were against him still, what then? He wouldn’t let himself imagine such a fate, not with a past so dark, or a mind now so fired.

He’d never be more ready, whatever lay ahead . . .

1

1993

Late Summer, Aranroe Village, County Mayo, Western Ireland

For three days in the heather-purpled mountains, he had hiked and climbed with the isolation to which he feared he was becoming addicted. On this, the day of his impending departure, his mind jumped between two worlds. Life in America: parole, washing cars, lying low, struggling to write. In this other world all of that felt foreign, unreal: these highlands, the islands, the pounding Atlantic, this bare country colluding with the ascetic he’d long embraced within himself. Yet now, as much as he could make himself be, he was ready to depart, to leave an unthinkable adventure made possible by Joel Vida’s string-pulling, and funded largely by Kate, eldest and closest of his sisters.

He strolled toward the tiny flower-trimmed station looking forward only to seeing Kate again, in Dublin, with whom he’d stay for five more days, then head back to Arizona and parole orders. But the station’s chalkboard timetable confirmed his suspicion: he was two hours early for the Dublin train. His wait would not be without consolation, however. Beyond the station’s half-glassed canopy towered Mweelrea, dark and intimidating, the great mountain that had won his respect and awe, which he would one day climb. How exhilarating his time here had been, he reflected, and how nurtured and fortunate it made him feel.

For over an hour he switched between
For Whom the Bell Tolls
and his meditations. At that point he was befriended by Aranroe’s old station master, an Einstein look-alike, an unexpected but welcome diversion. William, in his shiny-blue uniform and de Gaulle cap, was soon monologuing freely. By now, though, Tony MacNeill had few reservations about these people and their ways, for weren’t they his own, he thought, the salt of the earth, even when they didn’t recognise that his blood was as green as theirs. The old man recited with the sureness of age through a rosary of incidents, opinions and local lore. To Tony, the mutuality felt therapeutic; he’d been much too long away, a fact that wounded him now.

On this, his first return to Ireland, he’d come to know his father’s love of this land, a love he’d long been told was unrequited. Still, this would always be his father’s home. His home, too. He drifted into William’s wrinkles and whiskers, consumed his culture, felt the man merge with the air about and the bog underfoot, with the mountain below which he laboured, saw him become one with the strange air that enveloped everything – William, him, Ireland.

Then, in the evening sunlight, his gaze found a sole figure, a woman, on the opposite platform. Everything about her said she could not belong to a place like Aranroe: her style, her long flowing hair, her light-grey figured coat, which in itself seemed out-of-place on an evening he thought of as mild. She stood alone, staring alternately out to the meadows and back into the black tunnel chiselled out of rock. Her movements seemed edgy, he thought, or maybe it was just the thrill over someone due to arrive.

She expanded the arc of her eyes, taking in where Tony sat. He fought to draw away his gaze. But it was no longer his to control. Her glow felt warm, hypnotizing. His hand halted William.

‘Who is she?’ he asked.

‘Oh, her ladyship?
Is fear ná bac lei.
’

‘I don’t follow. What are you saying?’

‘Lady Leonora Quin.’ He spoke her name as if announcing her arrival at a grand ball. ‘If you’re a smart boyo you’ll mind your own business. That’s all I have to say.’

‘A lady? You mean she’s knighted, like a lord?’

‘Not at all, aren’t I only acting the eejit on you. I call her that because that’s how she goes on, the way she talks. Lenny Quin, that’s her name. One of them rich folks from up at the Abbey.’

‘Beautiful. Totally.’ Tony lingered in his own whispering, as if savouring an apparition. ‘Who’s she waiting for, do you know? Bet you know most of what happens around here.’

‘Get yourself into all manner of trouble and strife, keeping the company of gentry like that.’ William’s words bristled. ‘Especially the Quin clan.’

Beams of sunlight broke into the station’s interior. The woman paraded: tall, resplendent, rimmed in warm light. Tony’s mind was already made up. This was his time, his turn, he was only starting, feeling for once still young. An old man’s caution wouldn’t limit this opportunity, or take the lustre off risk.

‘Mind what I tell you, young American, for your own good. There’s trouble there.’

No, no, he wouldn’t, the voice inside him insisted. He could handle William’s idea of trouble. ‘I’m a Dub, William,’ he said, his eyes still on the woman. ‘Born in the heart of Dublin. Just happen to live in America. Tell me about her, anything.’

‘You don’t sound Dublin to me. All me life haven’t I been meeting all manner and creed, from red Russians to red Indians, and that’s not . . .’

Tony disengaged. Some previously vague part of him was responding, moving with her, with each sway and step and swish as she strode to and fro, to and fro, along the opposite platform, her high heels kicking clicks into the quiet of the evening. She was godly and mysterious, stylish, Hollywoodish, confident, alien. But it was something else about her, he caught himself thinking, something beyond words, that made him not afraid of her, which in itself caused him wonder.

‘William, introduce me!’ No sooner had the words rushed from him when a blare pierced through the station.

‘The Westport express,’ the train master said. ‘Late again.’

The coming of September was always like this, William went on, finding no urgency to rise off his ancient wooden bench. By this time every autumn nearly all the visitors were gone, he said, all but the late climbers and the Irish Language students. This year the rain had come early, some days hiding the peaks and valleys the tourists came to see, some even to paint. And the Atlantic itself, it was too rough now, though not for the old currach men, fellas born with sea water in their veins. September was good for one thing though: making things quiet, the way he liked it, not that he was past doing a jig or a reel at the odd
céili
. And right enough, the old saying still stood: one year in four September brought the devil’s weather, and that spoiled everything.

The Tony MacNeill of late had been fighting to see life in a new light. Fog and rain and wind and the scent of fresh wet countryside meant he was living again, and he cherished that. Such things as William might wish away, he had wished for and done without for too long in his twenty-seven years.

Then, at 5.58pm, eight minutes behind schedule, William declared, the old train groaned to a stop.

The woman leaned and strained, searching through the first wave of passengers disembarking. All streamed past her and out through the narrow, iron side-gate leading onto Aranroe Hill.

Tony noted her uncertainty, the impression that she might not easily recognise whomever it was she expected. Twice her interest had risen to particular men, but both times died as they got nearer and swept past.

Still, she held her vigil, showing signs of unease, drawing occasional nods from the final group of passengers.

Then, the platform empty again, she returned to pacing either side of the spot she had claimed earlier, scouring the carriage windows. Three or four times she stopped, remained still momentarily, then searched on into the emptiness of the station.

‘William, introduce me,’ Tony said. ‘I’m serious.’

‘Here she comes. You’ll not need me.’

Tony turned. The woman was coming alright, crossing over the railinged bridge, hair swaying, legs dancing out of her flapping coat. He sat motionless. What would he say, he asked himself; he’d zero experience at this kind of thing. He’d screw up. Perfect body, perfect legs. Fuck it, he couldn’t screw up. Only yards from him now, nicer, taller than he’d imagined, confident, sexy, slim. What did she want? Not him. She wanted William, train information. Calm down, he commanded himself. Fake it. Have a smile ready, something to say. What could he say: Hi, good-night, warm night, lovely evening, cold evening, grand day, chilly night, lots of frogs out, hello there, looks like rain, lovely night for rain.

‘Hi, I didn’t bring matches,’ the woman said, smiling down at him, much too close for his nerves, sweeping a hot storm over him. He felt himself gawking up at her. His smile was gone, words gone, mouth half open. Idiot! he cursed himself. He tried to speak but uttered nothing. Now his head would not move. The woman seemed to be floating. Was it all in a half-second, this paralysis? Then her puzzled expression gripped him. She was playing with his scrambled brain, that was it. A witch casting a spell over him, waving her white wand in his face. Then the noise came back.

‘You’re American?’ she said. ‘I’m guessing.’

‘Eh . . . well, em – ’

‘He’s a yank,’ declared William.

‘I love Americans.’ The woman’s smile unglued his stuck face.

‘Well, I’m not, I’m not really, I’m . . . born in Dublin.’

‘So was I – here in Ireland, I mean.’ She extended a slim unlit cigarette and asked with her smile for a light. ‘Didn’t bring matches,’ she said.

Tony rose up, but when erect he found himself too close to her, the bench behind allowing no retreat. As much as he could, he forced his body and face into casualness. He patted his denim jacket pockets, then his shirt pocket, then his jeans and jacket again and back to his shirt.

The woman held firm. ‘I bet you don’t even smoke. Do you smoke?’ Her voice was gentle, teasing. She radiated an I-found-you-out smile that pulled from him a laugh that went on too long and became what they were sharing.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m, you’re right, I don’t. It’s just that I – I don’t see, you know, see many people – ’

‘Like me?’

‘No, no, I don’t mean that. I mean, I don’t smoke. But I usually do, carry matches, with me, just in case, to light a fire. But I don’t have any, right now. I do a lot of hiking; that’s why I usually have them, matches, but I don’t..’

‘Not to worry. Truth is I don’t smoke either – when I’m feeling down I do.’

‘You’re . . . meeting a friend?’

‘Kind of. Not now. Where are you travelling to?’

Her intensity muddled his brain, roamed around inside him, saw all he was thinking, he was certain; she was being entertained by his fantasies and there was no way he could stop them, or her.

‘Actually, just before, just now, I was thinking of getting coffee, or tea. I have about an hour to fill – free, I mean, an hour free. You feel like – ’

‘Coffee? Are you serious? Around here that’s not easy.’

‘In the village, I thought, got to be some place open.’

Lenny’s manner of half-smiling had become a trap that caused him to stumble among words he knew nothing of until they had escaped from him. Now she looked at him as though carrying out an intimate assessment, a sensual examination of all that was private in him, his darkest secrets, at least that’s how it felt to him. His mind yelled again at him to say something sensible that would halt her invasion, enable him to hide. But he could not, dared not, speak his thoughts. Yet all other words, the polite words, felt wrong, foolish even, as he simultaneously endured and took pleasure in what she was doing to him.

He found comfort eventually in the realisation that they were both aware that what they were doing was no longer accidental. They were choosing this, whatever it was, each was knowingly expressing something: a need, a beginning, a longing, an interest, an emptiness. He didn’t know what it was. Nothing in his past had felt so compelling. In this moment was hope as he had never defined it. A rope lowering into the grey yard of his life. Perhaps.