A DANCE IN TIME

BY

ORNA ROSS

First Words

Star

2008

Christmas Eve 1982. My mother opened the front door of Doolough Lodge, saw me standing on the step, and rubbed her eyes. Fury surged in me, sudden and complete and the good intentions I had nursed all the way across the Atlantic Ocean were instantly swept away.

It wasn’t surprise that had Mom acting like a character in a bad movie, she was expecting me. No, this was her clumsy effort to hide the reflex response that always kicked in whenever she saw me – the slide of her eyeballs away from the sight, then the conscious tugging of them back.
She did her hardest to hide it but whenever my mother looked at me, it was my fat that hit her first.

In fairness, that hardly made her unique but you expect more from your mother than from the rest of the world, right? She just couldn’t help it. My excess flesh was her shame too. Public evidence of her failure to win Greatest Mother of All Time Award.

“Hello to you too, Mom,” I said.

“Oh darling, I’m so... Come in, come in.” She ushered me into the hall and pulled me towards her.

“Wait,”I said pulling back. “He’s definitely not here?”

“No, no. I told you.”

“And not coming back?”

“No”

“Okay, I’ll come in...” She reached for my the backpack but I held it, “provided you promise there’ll be no tears and no sorries. I haven’t come for a grand reconciliation.”

“Oh.”

“To be honest, I didn’t even know if I’d make it all the way here. I kept thinking I’d turn back.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. But that doesn’t mean-- Everything I said the day you left Santa Paola… every word of that still stands.”

“Okay, darling. I understand. But can I just say that—”

“No, don’t ‘just say’ anything. Let’s agree to not discuss it.”

“I understand.” She nodded agreement but I could see she’d be off again, first chance she got. She wouldn’t be able to help herself.

I shouldn’t have come.

She stood aside to let me in and led me down the hallway, towards the kitchen. It was strange to be in my grandfather’s house again. I remembered its old house smell but now there was an extra layer, a faint tang of disinfectant.

“How is Granddad?” I asked.

“He’s low today. It’s great you’ve come.”

Last time we were here, her dad ran us out of the place, yet she spoke like I was an ordinary granddaughter paying a loving sick call. Dear Mom, she did so love to play happy families.

In the kitchen, she put on the kettle and sat down opposite me. Before it was boiling, she had begun again. “Oh Star, I am sorry, so deeply, deeply sorry about what happened. I never – “

“You’re unbelievable, Mom. What did I just say out in the hall?”

“But if we don”t –”

I held up my hand. “If you’re going to insist on talking about this, then I’m out of here. And I won’t be back.”

“All right, all right... Calm down.”

She got herself busy with cups and tea bags while I took off my coat and searched in the pocket for cigarettes. As I shook one from the box, I heard myself let out a sigh so long and so deep it sounded like the last breath I’d ever take.

She turned. “Oh darling, how are you? Can I ask you that? Are you okay?”

“No.” My hands were shaking too hard to light up. “No Mom, I am not ‘okay’. I’m livid.”

“Oh Star.”

“I want to bulldoze houses and cut down trees. I want to set fire to all the fields and dump poison into all the rivers. I want to hurt everybody, everybody in the whole wide world and see does that make me feel any better.”

“Oh honey,”

“Don’t worry, it seems I won’t do it. I’ll just go on, apparently, the way I always have. But inside I’m seething.”

She looked at me, stricken.

“Seeing as you asked.”

It wasn’t always like that between me and my mother. I remember being a little girl and her singing to me. Twinkle Twinkle little Star, how I love you, all that you are. How her strawberry-blonde hair would fall forward as she bent over me, shimmers of starlight in it too. How I thought that song was mine and hers, alone, and was amazed when I went to school and heard it in other mouths, with different words. I do remember that.

My mother had a story she loved to tell about WB Yeats, her favourite poet. Apparently, when informed that he had mispronounced Benito Mussolini's name, he is supposed to have said: "I am told the name is not Missolonghi but Mussolini – but, does it… really…matter?"

Mom thought that was the coolest line. To me, it sounds affected, like the floppy bow tie and black clothes he used to wear in his youth so that people would know he was A POET but what Mom loved best about old WB was his disdain for fact.

“Only a breath separates fiction from non-fiction," she said to me the last time we talked about this book you hold in your hand. “That half-breath is the backwind to my story.” (To which I could only cry: “Ugh! Prentensho!” -- what my girlfriend, Veno, and I used to regularly shout at her when we were teenagers.)

Me, I like facts. To me, turning real lives into fiction seems slightly suspect. Mixing imagined and historical events, invented thoughts with those gleaned from real-life letters or diaries… As one of her “characters”, Ezra Pound, might say -- very, very bughouse.

Yet I am here.

Last week I sat beside my husband at an over-polished mahogany table listening to over-polished lingo from her solicitor. We walked out of that office considerably richer than we went in, but with me also hefting a 600-page manuscript and a self-serving letter. Dealt the ultimate deadline by breast cancer, my mother decided to ask me to see her only unpublished manuscript to completion. To tie together its loose ends and find it a publisher.

What I have found so far on these pages is shocking to me. I’m only on page 124 and already I’ve had numerous parts that made me jump up and shout at the page, “That’s NOT how it was”. Part of me would like to hurl the thing in the fire but curiosity and dying-request guilt will, I know, propel me to the end.

Good trick Mom. You win again.

Okay then, I’ll do it.

But I’m going to have my say too.

My better half thinks this is wrong of me. He says I shouldn’t have written that scene at the beginning from my point of view, or this foreword, or the footnotes either. This is my mother’s book, he says, not mine. I am merely the editor. My job is to ensure that what she wanted to say is said -- truly and clearly and unambiguously.

Fair enough. Nobody knows better than me how it feels to have what is yours taken over. So I’ll let go many of my mother’s asides about my body, my mind and my motives, even when I know her to be wrong, wrong, wrong. But some things do have to said.

Actually, I believe Mom expected me to “write back”. She all but said so on that last day in Laragh churchyard.

“It’s your story too,” she said.

She sat so erect on the bench that day, as we talked, her legs angled to one side. Old and ill and frail but somehow still lovely, her hair highlighted to a crisp ash-blonde now, all trace of stawberry gone. She wore it long, too long, some would say, for her age. Usually pinned into a coil at her crown but at that moment folded over one shoulder, falling in a curtain over the place where her breast used to be.

Then she added: “And Iseult’s too, of course.”

Oh yes, the other Iseult. She always had to be brought in. That’s the bit I can’t understand.

Or stand.

Once I asked her whether she ever resented the number of hours she spent on the Gonnes and their cronies. “No,” she replied, “they were my most significant hours”. (Ugh! Pretensho!)

But why? Why were they so important? What was there in the life of Iseult Gonne that she couldn’t let lie? When I think about her fumbling around the chasm between one piece of evidence and another, trying to touch a dead woman – trying to touch that particular dead woman – I get mad as hell.  But who am I mad at?

Maybe you can tell.

My mother was a writer and a thinker and just about the last person anyone would expect to commit murder. Not just murder, patricide. Yet -- strange thing -- when she said she hadn’t done it, few people believed her. This, her book, tries to explain why.

Only you can say whether it succeeds, whether it throws light on those events that almost destroyed us and whether, between us, she and I manage to give you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but….

Or indeed, whether, in the words of the great WB (all bow down, now), any of it …really… matters.
Maya ‘Star’ Creahy

One
A Hollow, Pearly Heart

I will my heavy story tell
Till my own words, re-echoing, shall send
Their sadness through a hollow, pearly heart;
And my own tale again for me shall sing,
And my own whispering words be comforting,
And lo! My ancient burden may depart.

WB Yeats, ‘The Sad Shepherd’

I’ll begin with my father’s journals, tumbling from their secret compartment at the back of the bureau, landing on the floor with an unforgiving thump. A large, thick notebook, with red hard covers, born to be a shop ledger. Inside, four hundred pages of his familiar handwriting, marching through pink ledger lines, as if they were not there. And five smaller diaries, with black soft covers, full of shorter notes.

My pulse, already pounding, skidded at the sight of that writing. I knew I had found what I was looking for, even though I hadn’t realized, until that moment, that what I was engaged in was a search. A memory of him sitting at this bureau to write rose in my mind. The bent back hunched over, the thick fingers clasped around a skinny pen.

Traces of him were all over these pages. Not just his words but creases and dog ears. Some kind of oil all over page 287. An ink spill on the cover of one of the smaller ones. Even those pages that seemed clean would have been brushed by his hand trailing across. His DNA could be reconstructed from these.

I turned back to page one, hand to my chest. August 6th, 1914. A new beginning for all of France and millions across Europe. On the inside cover he had stuck his conscription card and his medical records. I touched them and they came away, the glue dry and dead.

Yes, that’s where I’ll begin.

I could start a little earlier, with the moment when I first spied the hammer sitting under the corner table in the kitchen. Left there since I nailed a sprig of holly over the kitchen door – my poor attempt at Christmas decoration - it had caught my eye when its two fingers, normally used for prising out nails, seemed to twitch. To beckon me across.

Something clicked closed in my head when I saw this hammer. I picked it up, tapped its flat head against my palm, felt the weight of what I was about to do. Pulling my mind shut - no more thoughts allowed – I let it swing, hard and fast, into the TV screen. Smash. Shards of glass went spiking through the air. Smash again. The glass cabinet this time. I regretted that Star and I had cleared the glasses and ornaments from the shelves a few hours earlier; I would have loved to unleash myself on them.

Thump. I brought the hammer down on the little side table but it only made a dent. I found myself throwing it aside, then running through the kitchen and out the back door. It was dry outside and not cold, not for December. The automatic security light came on, spotlighting the weeds that cracked through the gravel. My hands slipped as I jerked the bolt on the shed open, grazing my knuckles. I sucked on the pain, my tongue moving across bone and blood. I felt like a hurricane, like a snowstorm, like a wild and raging ocean, hurrying, hurrying, a wild throb of hurry that kept thought at bay.

In the corner of the shed, I fount what I was looking for, the sledgehammer. Its heavy head pulled me down as I ran. Back inside, I went entirely amok. I smashed the coffee table and the sideboard. I smashed the fiddly occasional table that always wobbled, making us fearful for the lamp. I smashed the lamp. I turned my back on the piano - that I couldn’t destroy – and when I came to the bureau too, I hesitated. My father’s most precious piece of furniture: bought in Paris and transported back to Ireland, his only relic of the time he spent there. All through my childhood, I had watched him sitting at this desk to write, or do what he called “the books”, the accounts that measured his income against his expenses, the largest of which – he never failed to remind - was me.

Smash. The lump hammer put a deep V into its top and the back folded apart. As it did, a torrent of paper tumbled out. Money. Hundreds of notes: old pound notes and fivers and tenners and twenties. One of my father’s secret stashes. He had them all over the house: in a biscuit tin under the floorboards in his bedroom, inside an old plant-food container on a high shelf in the back pantry and no doubt in lots of other places that I knew nothing about.

It was the other bounty, though, that made me pounce. The notebooks. I picked them up with both hands. What would it do to me to read them? The thought set my heart fluttering around its cage of ribs, as if he were still alive to catch me. I sat down in the middle of the devastation and opened the largest one, hand on my chest as I started to read.

It was quite a while later – I have no idea how long – when the doorbell rang. Since Dr Keane’s questioning at the funeral two days before, I had been half-expecting a call from the police, yet when I heard the bell, my thoughts flew unbidden to Zach. The thought of him pinned me to the spot. Could he have come back to me?

No, of course not.

The bell rang again.

No.

I had made my choice and we both knew what it meant.

I pushed myself up from the floor and picked my way through the wood and glass and debris, the large notebook in front of my chest like a shield. I moved slowly, with reluctance, because anyone else was an unwelcome intrusion. On my way, the bell rang a third time and when I finally opened the door, I saw from the faces of the two policemen standing there that I hadn’t done myself any favours with the delay.

“Detective Inspector Patrick O’Neill,” said the one who wasn’t wearing a uniform, flipping a badge under my face. “And this is Garda Shane Cogley.”

I tried to steer them towards the kitchen but the Inspector - with what detective instinct? - headed straight for the parlour. The three of us stood in the open door and took in the destruction, the fivers and tenners all over the floor.

The Inspector turned his world-weary, mind-made-up eyes onto me. "What…?” he asked, pausing for emphasis. “What… in good God’s name has happened here?"

Without further preliminaries, he said he was investigating the murder of Martin Mulcahy –the full name, as if it was somebody I barely knew – and that he wanted me to come down to the station to help with their inquiries.

"You’re not serious?” I said, knowing from TV what that meant.

“Just a few routine questions.”

Garda Cogley snapped his notebook shut and put it back in his pocket.

“Do you need to inform anyone?” the Inspector asked, as he turned to lead us out.

I shook my head, dazed. “There’s nobody to inform.”

“Your daughter…?”

“No, she’s not here.”

“When will she be back?”

“I’m not sure.”

“We need to know, Mrs Creahy.”

“Mulcahy.”

“Mrs Mulcahy.” His look told me this this was not the time to ask for Ms. “We need to know her whereabouts. She’ll have to be interviewed.”
“She’s gone traveling around Ireland. Sightseeing. She only left a couple of hours ago.”

“You didn’t go with her.”

“No, I thought I better stay and look after my father’s affairs.”

“Yeah,” he said, pointing an ironical eyebrow at the devastation. “Come on, let’s go.”