The Past (17 page)

YOU CAME OF age on a day in July. It was a Monday and the beach was wholly deserted. One nun passed, whom you looked at closely,
hoping to see Sister Paul's smile. But it was a plumper face, buried under the folds of a different habit. The blocks of the ramp were so hot that you could hardly sit. You sat, though, and let their heat change into a private warmth. The tide was higher than you'd ever known it, halfway up the granite, obscuring the beach. You lay for hours in the swoon of that heat, your cheek touching the granite so that your eye travelled down from the tan of the stone, so hot that its surface seemed to dance, to the huge, perfect blue world of that sea. You knew something was happening, that time was longer than it should have been and you allowed those minutes to pass like hours, teasing every fragment of yourself out into the sensual glare of that surface. You imagined bubbles you had to burst repeatedly to find further bubbles inside them, you laid one cheek on the granite and then the other so that the sea seemed to leave its fixed position and globe above you, around you. There was a slight tremor in the granite and you sensed a train far off. You saw a tanker inching across the horizon and then the ground moved beneath you, every pore in the granite seeming to leap to your cheek and the train, going where, you wondered, came and was gone. You imagined the tide, higher than it ever should have been, flooding the ramp, water spilling over the granite on to the sleepers and tracks.

W
OULD SHE ALWAYS connect orgasm with trains, the even sleepers stretching into the distance and the border of black rail, meeting somewhere beyond her vision where they melted in a dance of haze, or in perfect union, where the laws of perspective told her they could never meet, only appear to? Or with the train itself, the mysterious rumble in the turf causing twigs to leap, heralding the sight through the haze of distance of ‘the one friendly machine'? She called it that later, when she spent more hours on it than off it. But the convivial machine roars past and the child waves and never knows whether her wave is received by the unknown face in that strip of windows, whether the memory is carried towards a far-off station, a platform, a black footbridge. And the hope of roses always, for the pure-hearted waver. She would wave her hand years later, like the child who rarely sees trains. She would think of roses blooming from the window, sprouting from the axles. She would picture the landscape towards which the train always goes, always a foreign one, a garish plain where the tracks run over pliant peat, pass a disused canal and enter a clump of fir trees. The fir trees dip in gratitude. It is the landscape into which she has never been, towards which the train heads as it thunders past her, always beyond the farthest town, never on maps. She walks along the tracks looking for that carriage
the dwarf told her of, which is small, like a childhood train. The tracks pass the canal that is now solid with frogspawn which falls over the sides of its banks, clinging to the fringe of pebbles by the track's edge. It spawns even as she walks. It clings to her bare feet like the gossamer of snails and she runs lightly to avoid it, stepping from sleeper to sleeper, between the tracks. The wood of those sleepers has fallen soft with age and holds the print of each of her steps. The tracks are bright with their oxides, a glare of red she never thought rust could achieve, and they thread the crest of the bog, towards the fir trees. She is walking with her head down, following the tracks and yet not following, for each sleeper is an end in itself and with each step she takes she knows she has come. The function of tracks is to lead the train from one point to another and the tracks themselves she knows are neither arrival nor departure, just partaking a little of both. But the soft wood of the sleepers and the frogspawn always doubling itself tells her with every footfall that she is here. And seen from behind, she knows, her walk would always intimate arrival, a bundle of static moments somehow thrown through time. You are here, the tracks say to her, and she holds this message as she would a towel to her bare breasts, her head bent downwards, knowing that somewhere beyond her the tracks do indeed meet. She feels the slightest shift of her thoughts could destroy this and so she walks with a terror, a terror that she feels necessary to maintain her sense of joy. For through this landscape in which every point is the point of arrival and every step is the ultimate step, she cannot deny that she is walking and that these tracks do lead towards that clump of fir trees and pass through it, to beyond. The frogspawn leaps as if to celebrate her thoughts and rises in imitation of the fir trees until she is among them
and a soft glove of pine needles covers the tracks. She is at the point, she sees, where the sides of the tracks meet, despite all the laws of perspective. And beyond where the tracks seam into one lies the train the little man told her of, glorious and aged. There is that bright red which rust could hardly manage. But it is rust, she sees as she draws nearer, a kind of passionate rust for the metal surface falls apart at her touch into puffs of the russet. And the rust seems there to highlight the forgotten roses. They spill from every crevice of the bodywork, from underneath the axle, from the cracks in the leather of the passenger seats. They are red and she is bathed in their shadow. She walks to the driver's cabin, through the brambles.

I HAVE PLACED the train with the roses by a disused canal and a clump of fir trees in the Bog of Allen, a flat open plane which is traversed by rail tracks, a wasteland between town and city. You tell it to Lili on the same ramp several days later. Your face flushes, but without a hint of coyness. You revere the physical details, moreover, the gleams of mica, the bumps of granite, the heat. Lili squirms and even now squirms before me in the telling, ‘Because I was a schoolgirl, yes, I may as well admit it, but there was more than that. I mean I feared for her. I sensed, you see, that my shyness was given to me, my bashfulness was learnt along with my history lessons and that was how it was, a bashfulness that, whether you like it or not, is safer and much more common than forthrightness. And if Rene hadn't learnt it—not only that, she wouldn't learn it, her reaction to every giggle of mine made me feel inconsequential, worse than a
child, a retarded adult—what would happen to her when she had to confront the source of that bashfulness? If she was extraordinarily lucky, she would never have to confront it, but how many of us are that lucky? And I feared for her, you see, and that's why I blushed—or that's as much why I blushed as my shame was why, if you know what I mean. And I was right to fear and blush, I discovered, when she told me that extraordinary story about the dwarf. And then I was made conscious of the fact—as she was never—the fact that we were both thirteen. Only thirteen. And that in many ways I was older than her . . . would she ever pass thirteen . . . and so I blushed and feared for . . .'

THEY EXCHANGE THESE confidences on the hottest days the beach has encountered, two girls, sitting on the lip of the ramp. Trains pass occasionally with the speed of a long, slow exhalation. The granite dances in the haze that makes the beach's inhabitants seem removed, far-off, transfixed against the blue sky and the yellow sand. But both girls hardly notice them. They are inside the bubble of their own warmth, their own words. Lili is reminded of that day the class exchanged confessions, of the rows of desks, the irises. Rene is talking, using words that are too young and too old for her thirteen-year-old mouth. She has her legs drawn into her chin, her hands are clutching her calves, damp with perspiration. Her legs are plumpish, Lili swears. Three years later they will be on the back page of the
Freeman's Journal.
They will have slimmed by then, be still fairly short, but give a definite impression of adulthood.

‘BUT THE YEARS passed like days on that ramp. And when we finally got up with our bums creased with all that granite, it was three years later. She was sixteen—'

W
HILE LUKE VANCE and James stand waiting at Bray station, part of the line caves in on the way to Greystones. A wave that must have germinated far out rises like an open hand, clutches the tracks and drags them towards itself. The metal bends in the water and the sleepers scud through the foam, haloed by the spray. The Bray train knows nothing of this but exhales a welcoming shroud of steam to them, father and son. Luke carries the tripod, James the case. They walk through the steam, through the door and take their seats on the seaward side.

‘SHE HAD A premonition, I suppose. The dark wings brushed off her, making her cloaks flap. You will be a professional, she told Rene, there is a photographer I know. I came with them. It will be your assignment, she told her, your money. I walked with them down O'Connell Street. Can you imagine that voluminous animal dying, being there one moment, gone the next? I can't, even now. I had lived her through her stories, secondhand ever since I'd known them. But did she know, I often wonder, was that photograph a hint that she
would someday live in Rene, Rene alone? An acquaintance stopped her on O'Connell Bridge. They talked for a while, they had that tone of voice, as when you talk of the Free State—'