Torn Water Read online

  Death from an Acute and Unrelenting Hunger

  The fields are blackened from the blight. I can see some of my neighbours crawling across the soil scrabbling for one healthy potato. I feel sorry for them. I cannot remember the last time I ate, for in my dreams I have always been hungry. My mother died a few days ago, followed quickly by my aunt Teezy. They died in each other's arms. I didn't have the strength to bury them, and had to leave them where they fell.

  Once I believed that God had given me the power to save everyone by teaching them how to eat stones and the fine dust that fell from the cracks of buildings, but no one would listen. Another time I believed that the clouds were edible and spent days building a flying machine from twigs and the trunk of a fallen tree, but I must have misheard God's instructions for it refused to fly.

  Most of the time, though, I just sit on the headland that fronts my small village, watching the sea. Sometimes I think I can see my mother dancing in the waves.

  It is late now and God is talking to me again. I like it when God speaks to me, I like the way it soothes my heart, and the way the world expands like a mouth being kissed.

  I stand. My slender body sways like a leaf on a branch. I smile to myself as I realise suddenly that God has given me wings and that I am climbing to the roof of the world to join my mother, and that my hands are full of clouds and the icy sparks of stars. My flight doesn't last and before long the cold night sea is travelling towards me at speed. By then, though, it is too late to change my mind.

  4. Outer Space

  When he was younger he was obsessed with the pictures of the Apollo astronauts. He remembers the lonely slope of their shadows on the moon's lifeless surface and the blackness surrounding them, as if on every hand there was mystery. He remembers wondering if that was where his father had gone when he died – is that where everyone went? Did they melt into the darkness that held the earth and the other planets captive?

  Sometimes he thought he could hear his father's cries for help, and he pictured him spiralling like a satellite in the outreaches of space, his body slowly blackening. He would wake and rush to his bedroom window, his eyes scouring the night sky, his heart yearning to join his father in the depths of the universe.

  He had tried to tell his mother that he believed his father was lost far, far out in the cosmos. He had tried to tell her one morning, years before, as she had faced him across the breakfast table. He remembers the frustration of not being able to say the words, to push them from his lips. He remembers his mother scowling with impatience, sharply telling him to eat his breakfast and to stop the nonsense. Eventually he had stood, limbs quivering with frustration. Then he had yelled it, as if his life depended on it: ‘Daddy is with the astronauts! I heard him! I heard him crying …’

  His mother had slowly placed her fork on the plate and stood, carefully pulling the creases free in her skirt. Then she had walked to where he was standing. She had clamped her hands beneath his armpits and lifted him up, then slammed him back into his seat. He had landed with a jolting shudder that banged his jaw shut. She had leaned very close into his face, and had wordlessly cautioned him, her eyes unblinkingly facing his.

  It is the end of the second week of Sully's return. They are on Sully time: everything his mother says and does revolves around him. She is standing by the kitchen door. Her hair is mussed; a piece of toast hangs from her lips. Sully has just left, having stayed the night. He's only back and already they're playing Happy Families.

  ‘Sully wants to take you see Northern Ireland play.’

  ‘I don't like Northern Ireland,’ James says.

  ‘What's that supposed to mean? You're Irish, aren't you?’

  ‘That's what I mean.’

  ‘Oh, don't start that. Football's just football.’

  ‘No, it's not.’

  ‘he's making a real effort this time, Jimmy. Come on, meet him half-way.’

  ‘Why are you back with him?’

  ‘That's between him and me.’

  ‘No, it's not. I live here too … or had you forgotten?’

  ‘Don't be cheeky or – ’

  ‘Or what, Mum? Or what? You'll get Sully for me?’

  ‘Jesus.’

  He slams the door on his way out and glares at Mrs McCracken as she stands in her doorway opposite theirs, her eyes lifting disapprovingly from the untouched pile of logs to meet his. ‘Is someone going to do something about those logs?’

  But he ignores her and begins to walk towards the town.

  ‘Here, son, this is for you …’

  He can remember looking up into Teezy's eyes as he took the photograph from her. He can remember the look on her face as if it was about to break.

  ‘That's your daddy.’

  It was a small, dog-eared photograph of a man standing against a hill, squinting into the sunlight, right hand raised playfully to his face.

  ‘He died for Ireland … Sssh,’ she had said, as if the world was listening.

  ‘Sssh,’ he had replied, cooing it up into her face. ‘Sssh.’

  ‘Now, no more astronauts, no more stories. They only upset your mammy.’

  ‘Sssh.’

  For days afterwards he had wandered around, whispering it within earshot of the grown-ups. ‘Sssh,’ he remembers saying, putting his small face close to his mother's. ‘Sssh.’

  ‘It's our secret. It's our private story,’ Teezy had said, as she had given him the photo. ‘Wasn't he a fine-looking man? As fine as Ireland herself.’

  ‘Sssh,’ he had said.

  ‘This is your father … He died for Ireland.’

  He remembers how he had looked at the worn photograph, at the slender figure that grinned at him through the fallen years. Sometimes now he would bring it out from its hiding-place and quietly gaze at it, his eyes hunting its held landscape. He would hold the photo delicately as if it was made of silk. At other times he would quietly curse the man, damn him for leaving, hate him for his absence, his fingernails digging into the photo's edge so that they left crescent-shaped marks.

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  ‘Watch where you're going, sunshine.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He looks up into the fuck-you face of Malachy O'Hare, the estate hard man.

  ‘IRA or Prod?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘IRA or Prod?’

  James looks across at Malachy's troops, small, hard-faced boys. ‘For fuck's sake, IRA.’

  ‘Don't curse when you say it. Don't disrespect the flag.’

  ‘Sorry … IRA.’ He goes to slide past them, careful not to look any of them directly in the eye.

  ‘Hold on a minute, sunshine. Do us one of your deaths.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Jimmy Lavery, the Death Machine. Do us one of your deaths.’

  ‘Give us a break.’

  ‘Do one … or else.’ He raises a large fist to the tip of James's nose.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Good man yourself.’ Malachy's face breaks into a big, muggy smile. ‘What have you got for us today?’

  James looks skywards, and after a moment he says, ‘Well, there's this astronaut … and he's lost his mother ship …’

  ‘An Irish astronaut?’ Malachy asks.

  ‘Yeah, an Irish astronaut.’

  An Astronaut's Final Message

  Time: 0900 hours

  Location: Support Capsule

  The Erin Galaxy

  Date: 12 Dec 2157

  Message Received From: Captain Conn Lavery.

  Dear Ann and Little Jimmy,

  By the time you receive this transmission I will be dead. As I write this I am slowly suffocating. For the last hour I have been using my spacesuits reserve tank of oxygen, but even that now has begun to fail. The mother ship is ablaze, I can see it beyond, through my small porthole window, and it looks like a devil's eye, hot and fiery. All my comrades are aboard her, good strong men, with only one love in their lives: Ireland. It is strange to think that I will never see either of you again,
that I will never hold you close and feel the full warmth of your bodies.

  I hope you both remember me fondly, as a true Irish spaceman. We fought hard, my son, harder than you can ever know. We repelled the alien hordes three times before their greater military strength began to tell. We all die, son, we all die, and we must be grateful for the time we have had together. It is strange to think that space will be my grave; the huge black belly of space will be a mausoleum for my bones. Look after your mammy, my son. Let no one come between her and my memory. I love you both dearly, more than you can know. I have decided to leave my capsule, the oxygen has gone, and the little I have left in my spacesuit I'm hoping will sustain me on my walk to meet the face of God. I'm stepping clear of the capsule now … Air is going quicker than I thought. I love you both. Look for a new star tonight in the sky.

  Love for as long as there is any, Captain Conn Lavery.

  End Of Transmission.

  5. The Rehearsal

  He is following Mr Shannon, scrambling behind him, trying to keep up with his long strides, down High Street and across the Mall. The streets are full of schoolchildren scurrying for buses and with shoppers flitting in and out of stores.

  ‘Keep up, Lavery, keep up. You're letting the side down, old boy.’

  Shannon seems to glide along on his own current of air, swaying to avoid a pack of schoolgirls, tipping his head in greeting to people he knows. James collides with a small dog, its body contracting into yelps as his foot finds its paw. Shannon comes to a halt and looks back at the dog, hopping around on three legs, and at James scurrying after it.

  ‘Hit it a boot in the hoop, Lavery, and look lively. Tempus fugit. Good day, Mrs O'Rourke.’

  Mrs O'Rourke stares at James and pushes him away as he tries to make amends with her dog. ‘Clear off, you hooligan.’

  ‘I'm sorry,’ he whimpers.

  ‘Piss off before I take a lump out of you. Good afternoon, Mr Shannon, you're looking well this fine day.’

  ‘One can but try, Mrs O'Rourke, one can but try.’

  He watches as Shannon struts away from him, delicately sidestepping a pushchair, full of fruit and groceries.

  Mr A. G. S. Shannon is James's English teacher, ‘a force for literature’, as he likes to call himself. James can remember the first time Shannon had stood before him in classroom G14, seven years before, giving his new English lit charges the once-over. He wore moccasins and James can remember their slap on the floor as he paced, his heels making a small sucking noise as his feet travelled back and forth. His hair in those days was a Brylcreemed black with a kiss-curl that fell daintily across his wide forehead. It was his belly, though, that fascinated James: it was large; it seemed to begin at his sternum and end at his groin. James thought it looked as if it had been grafted on to his body for it seemed at odds with the relatively slender man that carried it.

  ‘My name is Mr A. G. S. Shannon and my business is literature, and your business is to make it your business.’ Then he had lifted his head and raised an index finger to his chin. ‘If you have knowledge of language, my boys, you have a shot at the truth. Without it you will remain in your Neanderthal twilight, grunting and pawing your way through life.’

  Some boys had burst out laughing, some had let out a snort of protest, but James and a couple of others had held the thought he had given them as if it were fashioned from gold. He was different from the rest of the teachers. He didn't seem to have the same cranky dedication to authority, or the constant need to flex it. James would often hang around at the end of class, waiting to catch his eye, to be fed a small morsel of his attention. Sometimes he would put his arm across James's shoulders and walk him from the class. They would amble down the corridor, Mr Shannon's rich quotes from Shakespeare weaving seamlessly with the strong blades of sunlight streaming through the windows.

  Rehearsals are in an old two-storeyed townhouse off Canal Street. The front door lies open, revealing a long, narrow hall lit only by a solitary lightbulb, with a wooden staircase at the end. They climb to the top floor, Shannon sometimes taking two, three steps at a time. Two men he has never seen before stand by a fireplace. Shannon guides him towards them, his hand delicately placed between the boy's shoulder-blades. The men look up from two tattered scripts; one wears a Paisley cravat.

  ‘Gentlemen, may I introduce you to young James La very? He is our Martini. La very, this is Cathal Murphy.’

  The man wearing the Paisley cravat extends his hand, and James shakes it shyly.

  ‘And this reprobate, Lavery, is the inestimable Oisin “Chin Chin” Daly.’

  Oisin “Chin Chin” Daly is at least six feet tall, with long, greasy, heavy hair. He has brown eyes that flicker watchfully from behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. ‘Mr Lavery …’

  ‘Mr Chin Chin – sorry, Oisin.’

  ‘No, man, you scored the first time.’

  Suddenly two women are in the doorway. One is small with red, short-cropped hair and a freckled face; on her shoulder is a green duffel bag with white trim. The other rummages furiously in one of two plastic shopping-bags. She is plump and short with greying brown hair.

  Shannon eyes her imperiously, left eyebrow arched. ‘Ah, Nurse Ratshit at long last.’

  ‘Ratchet, Nurse Ratchet, you bollocks. Where the f—ing hell are my car keys?’ Suddenly she notices a set hanging from her friend's hand. ‘For Chrissakes, Patricia, why didn't you pipe up? And me making a complete arse of myself.’

  ‘You gave them to me not two minutes ago, Kerry, in case you lost them.’

  The play they are there to rehearse is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. James has been roped in to play Mr Martini, a paranoid character who spends most of the play talking with an imaginary friend. Mr Shannon had crept into the physics class the week before and asked permission from Mr Bennett to steal James for ten minutes.

  ‘Of course, Mr Shannon, have him for as long as you'd like.’

  As they stood in the science corridor, Shannon had dug a thin book out of his briefcase, and held it skyward, an awkward grin of triumph spreading across his lips. ‘Do you know what this is, Lavery? Do you have any idea?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘An American classic, Lavery, a modern classic from the New World.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I want you to peruse it.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Read it.’

  ‘Why, sir?’

  ‘Because you are going to be in it.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes. Your part is Martini. Rehearsals begin next Tuesday afternoon after school. Performance in the amateur drama festival at the Opera House, Belfast, one month from now.’

  ‘Why me, sir?’

  ‘Why not you, La very? Pray, why not you?’

  James had watched as Shannon walked away from him, backside swaying, head held high. Just before he turned the corner he raised the fingers of his right hand and wiggled them.

  Back in the physics class, he had turned the booklet over and over in his hands.

  ‘What's that?’ Seamus Byrne, the boy next to him, had asked, when Bennett wasn't looking.

  ‘A play.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A play.’

  ‘You poof.’

  A week later, against his better judgement, there he is. With everyone now seated and settled, Mr Shannon calls for order, his briefcase resting on his knees. A curt businesslike smile announces that their evening's work is at hand. Behind them is the fireplace, full of debris, half-burnt parish circulars and cigarette packets. Barely at first, James sees the shape of something else lurking in it, blacker than shadow, a dead crow, its head wrenched and twisted back on itself, its beak frosted with ash.

  ‘Now, business of the first order … We have a new addition to our ranks, Master Lavery from Carrickburren. Lavery will be playing Martini.’

  All faces are smiling at him. Cathal Murphy gives him a playful dig in the ribs, the two women whisper to each other and one bl
ows him a kiss. Most excruciating of all, he can feel the doting beam of Mr Shannon's stare.

  ‘As you can probably surmise, we are a little short-staffed at the moment, due to teaching commitments, babysitter shortages … and downright laziness. But do not despair, all will be well – once I've broken a few heads.’

  A siren wails outside. Shannon tries to speak but swallows his sentence, letting the noise bleed through and out of range. ‘Well, after that rather apt fanfare, let us get down to business. Mr Lavery, let us take a bold step. I would like us to begin this evening with the nightmare sequence involving your character, Mr Martini, and his brutal, painful memories of a particular airborne dogfight. Martini is sleepwalking, running, believing he is immersed in a very nasty gun battle alone, thousands of feet in the air and very, very frightened. You, of course, know the sequence I mean?’

  James is confident that he does, despite the slow rush of blood he can feel building in his cheeks. He has read the play between homework assignments, sitting at the kitchen table as his mother fussed and cleaned.

  ‘What's that you're reading?’ his mother had asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  He had looked at her. He knew that mood, that brittle hung-over mood. She and Sully had been out until late the night before. They had woken him up when they got back. All day she had been in bad form, giving James that I'm-watching-you stare.

  ‘Don't give me that! What is it? You've been stuck in it for hours.’ She grabbed the play and began to read it. He made a lunge for it but she moved away. ‘Is this to do with your English studies?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Either it is or it isn't.’

  ‘Mr Shannon asked me to be in it.’

  ‘In what? In this?’

  He nods. She hands back the play. ‘You mean appear in it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She doesn't say anything, just looks at him. Then she says, ‘I'm not happy about it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I'm not.’

  ‘Why, Mum?’

  ‘I'm your mother and I'm not happy. Mothers get to say things like that. OK?’

  He had gathered up his books and stormed out of the kitchen. His mother had followed him to the doorway shouting after him: ‘I don't want you reading that thing. I don't like that Shannon one, I never did. He's far too smooth for my liking. Did you hear what I said?’