Shade (9 page)

“No,” Nina answered, “it was a unicorn.”

“Dan Turnbull said it was Mabel Hatch’s goat.”

“Well, Hester told me it was a unicorn. What do you think, Janie?”

“A unicorn,” said Janie, “without a doubt.”

“So where does a unicorn come from?” George asked. He was in a shifting, uncertain world, each question could be referred to an entity that wasn’t there.

“From the sea,” Nina answered. “Hester thinks a unicorn comes from the sea. And in the sea it has a tail like a mermaid, or a sea-horse really, and when it reaches the land, why the tail turns into legs.”

“Legs,” repeated George.

“Legs, four legs. A tail for the water, legs for the land.”

And sure enough, the cloven tracks led right to the water’s edge, where they disappeared into the inky current.

“A unicorn feeds on starfish,” Nina said, “spears them with its horn, and that’s what the horn is for. And when the starfish run out, a unicorn has to venture on dry land.”

“And what does it eat on dry land?” George asked.

“Eels,” said Nina without hesitation.

“Eels,” repeated Janie.

“Eels and starfish, the basic unicorn diet without which its horn falls off, the coat moults and it ends up looking like any old goat.”

“Goat,” said Georgie, “you said goat.”

“I said like any old goat, didn’t I Janie?”

“You did, Nina. And stop asking unicorn questions, Georgie, we’re getting tired.”

So they ran from Mozambique to the Sahara, the Sahara being those large slopes of elephant grass which they tumbled down, dresses up to their shoulders, bloomers to the air.

“Close your eyes, George, and count to twenty,” Janie said.

“What if I don’t?” he replied.

“Then the unicorn will get you—”

So of course he shut them on the instant, placed sandy fingers over his crinkled lids and began counting. And they ran fast and kept running until he was long out of earshot, until they reached that jagged line of rocks where the river met the sea. Janie pulled off her dress and dived and Nina followed suit and they swam out to the raft by the Lady’s Finger and lay there for hours until the sun had dried their skins to a silken sheen, till they heard George roaring from the shore, an ancient bellow of agony and loss. And they turned their heads and saw a salmon fisherman comforting him, though his grief seemed unstoppable. They dived back in and swam towards him, got close enough to hear the fisherman saying, there are no unicorns son, and even if there were they wouldn’t take your sister.

“What was that, mister?” Janie said, stepping from the water like a mermaid herself, the sun glinting on every drop that clung to her thin body. “What do you know about unicorns?”

“Where’s the poor craythur’s mother?” the fisherman asked.

“She drowned,” said Janie, “she was swimming, when the unicorns took her.”

Janie held out her arms for George. But the one he ran to, clung to, was Nina.

That body, smaller than mine, a ball of muscle even then, clinging to my wet self for fear the unicorns would take me. I kissed his tears away and took his hand and said, “Georgie, porgy, pudd’n’npie, kissed the girls and made them cry. Stop it now.” But he couldn’t, great raking breaths coursing through his lungs, his arms, his hands, his lips shaking for fear of a loss he couldn’t comprehend, and when the fear was banished the tears kept coming, a delirium to be stopped only by its own exhaustion. It was the first of those moments when the world, its furies, its pains, its agonies overwhelmed him with a physical wallop. And as he grew the warp-spasms grew, until at last they lost the battle with his great hulking body and buried themselves somewhere inside it. But then he was small, tiny and afraid and I carried him, little Nina, big George, through the Sahara grasses, back over the mudflats of Mozambique to the curve of river by the swing and dipped him in. And only those waters seemed to calm him.

From the top window of the dead governess’s room the phosphorescent sea is visible, the waves crashing with their insane regularity, the foam gleaming in the winter moonlight and the small row of cottages in the bowl of dunes beneath it. Two of them were thatched then and one, George and Janie Tuite’s, had a red oxide corrugated metal roof. We came to share each other’s homes, the anomaly of the contrast between the large limestone one and the minuscule one of pink-tinted whitewash being lost entirely on the three of us.

Jeremiah Tuite, who worked as pilot for the Harbourmaster, who would take us on his tug as he went to help the boats cross the bar, whose blue serge waistcoat had anchor buttons on it, came to view me, his “little Nina,” as a cousin, a niece, a half-sibling of kinds, he found me so often beneath his corrugated roof. He smoked a pipe and drank porter in the Silver Dollar Bar. He swung Mrs. Eva Tuite in a ceremonious half-circle each time he came home, as if he had just navigated to safety the
Flying Dutchman.
He would sit wreathed in tobacco-smoke, chair tilted against his pink-washed cottage wall, scanning the horizon for incoming vessels, then begin the race to be the first to meet it. His little Nina came to love that smoke, the peaty smell of it, came to love the sound of rain drumming off their metal roof, the taste of salted herring and potato cakes, if the rains persisted and she had to stay for tea.

And when the summer ended and school began, it seemed natural that the lacunae left in her education by the dead governess should be filled by the National School System. So she came to walk, with Janie and George, the three miles from her house to the National School on the Drogheda Road. The smell of sour milk would hit her from the yard, blending uneasily with the tang of urine from the toilets. She picked her way through the scraps of yesterday’s bread, through the scavenging seagulls, her white shoes a perfect contrast to the grime. She found herself privileged there, in the dull green room with the high windows, the sunlight crawling through them, reaching only the upper walls; Miss Cannon, with a green plaid skirt to match those walls, leaving her free to dream, presuming the large house she came from conferred some prior refinement on her.

She was spared the strap and the ruler, the ruler which rained liberally on poor George’s palms, his knuckles, his head, his shoulders. George got to know that strip of wood intimately, its edges serrated with the indentations of inches and feet, got to know its mood, its weather, its humours, always, it seemed, malign. “Your place, George Tuite,” Miss Cannon would loudly inform him as he stuttered through his
Viva Voce,
“is not so much in this class as in the low field with your trousers in one hand and a lump of grass in the other.” The same field that Nina, Janie and George sat in after school, filling his copybook among the cowslips. But their neat girlish handwriting could never save him from the terror of recitation, his breath coagulating in his chest and his stutter rising gradually from staccato to the strangled lament of a dying swan. His broken syllables would stretch into one long single vowel, rising in his boy-soprano pitch to meet the whistling trill and crack of Miss Cannon’s chosen instrument. The manuscript of his hands became an object of wonder after school, how two small lumps of flesh could carry so much scrawl—weals, welts, mounds of purple, streaks of broken, bloodied skin.

Nina would take one calloused hand, Janie the other and walk him down the lane to the low field among the haystacks. While Janie gathered cowslips, Nina would crush dockleaves and wrap them round his beaten hands and tell him Jesus Christ suffered more.

“Will you marry me, George?” she would ask him, spreading the green juice from the dockleaf like lipstick over his trembling mouth.

“Yes,” he would answer without hesitation, a blush like real lipstick spreading to his cheeks.

“You heard him, Janie, he said yes.”

“And that’s a promise,” Janie would say, placing cowslips on each of her fingers. “And if you break it, Hester will give you a whipping.”

“Does Hester give whippings?” George would ask.

“Yes,” said Nina, “with her blackthorn stick. None of Miss Cannon’s old rulers for Hester. In fact, here comes Hester now, she wants to be a witness.”

“What’s a witness?”

“The one who says I heard you say you’ll marry her and who’ll give you a whipping if you don’t. The one who says, now is the time to kiss the bride.”

“Who’s the bride?”

“I am, silly. And now’s the time.”

And Nina kissed him. On his green-smeared lips, on his green-smeared, calloused hands.

“Is that better, George?”

And George would nod. The kiss, he wanted to say, was almost worth the beating.

He grew attached to the after-school salving, to the kisses, to the hands that crushed the dockleaves, the fingers that placed them on his weals, the lips that brushed off each bloodied stripe, to the sight of her walking towards him from the house each morning, as he waited with Janie behind the metal gates. He would see the large door open, the mother bend down to kiss her cheek, see Nina emerge, oddly self-possessed, feet crunching delicately on the gravel, framed by the large, grey house.

“What larks, Pip,” she would say, like her father.

“What larks, Joe,” was his and Janie’s answer, though they knew not why.

He walked barefoot for the first two months, September, October, then, when the November chill set in, inherited a pair of boots several sizes too big that left his sockless ankles raw. Nina found a pair of her own cast-off bootees and fitted them on his feet one morning in December, when the weals on his ankles almost matched those on his hands and the frost on the ground made walking barefoot impossible. Then he made his way over, the two miles to school in uncommon comfort, only to be surrounded in the schoolyard and pilloried mercilessly. Georgie Porgy what’s the news, comes to school in girlie shoes. Georgie lashed out with his delicate boots and his fists which proved surprisingly indelicate, felled three of his tormentors before he was frogmarched by Miss Cannon to another, more comprehensive thrashing.

And thereafter a different George emerged, as if a chrysalis of soft skin had been shed, revealing a tougher, more impenetrable one beneath. His stutter congealed, during
Viva Voce,
into a monosyllabic mumble, his hands developed hide like leather and began to tire even Miss Cannon’s indefatigable arm, and he grew into a child larger than most, immune to teasing, to his peers’ contempt, still unaccountably attached to Nina’s cast-off boots.

He wore them on the wran day, when they dressed him in one of Janie’s smocks and carried him in a handcart from house to house with blackened faces and an imaginary bird in a furze bush. He wore them as the winter changed to spring, as the frozen earth on the road to school turned to mud again, as May approached and the mud turned to hard earth with a coating of fine dust. When his growing toes sprouted between the leathers and the uppers he wore them still; when Janie had cast off her own shoes and walked happily barefoot again, he wore them still; he wore them till all the stitching had shredded, till the soles had flapped loose, till the laces decayed and they literally fell off his feet. And only then did he go barefoot again.

“What larks, Pip,” Nina said, seeing the discarded bootees by the roadside.

“What larks, Nina,” he replied.

“You don’t say what larks Nina,” Janie told him, “you say what larks Joe.”

“Why can’t I say what larks Nina?”

“Don’t ask me, ask Nina.”

“Because that’s not in the story.”

And Nina told him the story just as her father had told it, of Pip and Joe Gargery and of the larks they had when Mrs. Joe wasn’t looking, of the blacksmith Orlick, the convict Magwitch and the beautiful Estella.

“The beautiful Estella,” George repeated.

“Yes,” said Nina, “in the big house behind the barred gates, with Miss Havisham and her mouldy wedding dress.”

~

The books frozen in their places on the shelves:
A Child’s Garden Of Verses,
Cautionary Tales, The Water Babies, What Katy Did, Lorna Doom, Little Women,
Jo’s Boys, Little Men, Hard Times, Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre.
The mildew on their spines dampens as the winter sun creeps through the window and ices over once more at night. Each frosted title acts like a lost perfume, whole worlds released in association. Matilda told such dreadful lies, it made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes. My memories, frosted like theirs, as yet untitled. What larks, Pip. Miss Havisham, all her clocks stopped. Now that time has stopped do I remember, no, I read, as if within those frozen spines, the book whose ending I didn’t write, written for me by one who hardly learned to write. I give it chapter headings, turn the non-existent pages, inhabit the story, delight in it, weep in it, die in it. But can I change the conclusion? Not a whit. The end began it and beginning ended it.

Then the freeze itself ends, with the mists and the white hoar-frost, and the bubbling spines of my library run with water. A proper Irish winter has set in. Rain is ever-present now, veils of it some days, torrents on others, and the ground beneath the copse of ash trees round the cottage becomes a swamp, with the plop and splash of water from the branches above. George’s door stays open, sagging on its hinges, and the radio finally dies under the gathering damp. The chestnut over the bend of the river grows a permanent sheen, indistinguishable from the brown swirls of the water below. The house drips from the roof, the ceilings, moss and lichen flourish on the garden walls. Schoolchildren run past the bleak facade at evening, fearing ghosts and muttering prayers, but gather in the grey mornings to throw stones. The windows crack, split and shatter, glass splinters littering the sodden carpets, and the winds come through, shaking loose the doors, the wardrobes, lifting the mouldering rugs in undulating waves, whipping the linens from their shaken drawers, through the windswept corridors, like ghosts themselves. The shattered windows reinforce the haunted mien of the grey limestone facade, the children scurrying by it faster, mouthing charms their mothers taught them, sharing tales of the presence inside, female of course, in white, carrying her head sometimes, her intestines others, in a gown of blood-streaked white but never, it seems, in an ageing fur coat, in Wellington boots and a black beret.