A Mad and Wonderful Thing (27 page)

We are on our way to London. Aisling has a two-week break from college and has the free use of her cousin's bedsit in Chiswick while her cousin, a newly qualified biologist, is away in Boston on a course.

‘Will you come?' she asked me.

‘To the heart of the enemy?' I answered. ‘Sure.'

My only doubt was my Renault 4 — it's a long drive for the old girl. We decide to take a chance with the car and to take our time with the trip: three days to get there, a week in London, and three days to come home.

‘To her majesty's great and glorious realm we go,' I say, ‘Rule Britannia.' And we leave, throwing goodbyes behind us.

‘How far will we go today?' Aisling asks.

‘How far is salvation?' I ask her.

She looks down at the route. ‘I don't see it here on the map.'

‘What about happiness and contentment?'

She looks down again. ‘No, I don't see them either. But that's the problem with maps, Johnny — they sometimes don't show what's straight in front of you.'

‘Let's decide en route,' I say, and with that resolution she settles into her seat.

We drive to Dublin and take the afternoon ferry to Wales, and it is evening and dark when we arrive in Holyhead. We decide to stay there for the night, and we find a small bar-hotel near the port. I had asked Aisling to keep an eye out for something with an inexpensive look about it. This place fits the ticket.

‘One room or two?' I enquire, as we lift a bag each from the Renault.

‘That I'll leave to you, Johnny-boy.'

Up until I stand at the reception, I don't know myself what I shall ask for. I settle on one.

‘What's the point of two?' I say to Aisling as I take the key. ‘That would only be a waste of money.'

‘Well, we shouldn't waste money, Johnny,' she says, holding my arm as we climb the stairs to our room.

We wash and return to the bar for dinner. The bar is empty, but for two men sitting by the counter and a middle-aged man in a crumpled, dirty-grey suit sitting alone and reading a newspaper. We take a table by a burning coal fire. We order fish and creamed potatoes.

‘Have you any Margaux?' I ask the barman. I don't know why I ask for Margaux — the thought has just rushed at me.

‘Never heard of it.'

‘Well, thanks be to God for that,' I tell him. ‘I didn't want it anyway.'

We order a bottle of white wine, the cheapest the hotel has, and the barman leaves us, carrying a doubtful frown.

After the meal and the wine, we return to the room.

‘What side of the bed do you want?' I ask her.

‘I don't know.'

‘Okay then,' I say. ‘You take the left, but don't be sneaking over my side just to get a crafty feel of me.'

She laughs and marches off to the bathroom to change.

The whole performance is ludicrous. This journey — for us both — is an awkward crossing, and we are like two nervous teenagers fumbling our way into courtship.

She returns through the dark room and enters the bed. I hold her hand, but in the night I know that I have pulled her close.

‘I think you might have tried to seduce me when you were asleep,' I say to her in the morning.

‘I did not.'

‘I think you did. It's nothing to be ashamed about. It could happen to any woman.'

‘I'm sorry, Johnny. And you being real nice and minding me so well, holding my arse all night.'

I laugh and rise from the bed.

We have coffee in the hotel bar, and afterwards we walk along the main street and buy newspapers. We leave Holyhead and drive to Bangor, and stop for petrol and tea and a fried breakfast, and thus fuelled we push the Renault south and east through wet, green valleys on the A5, through the grey-stone villages of Betws–y–coed, Corwen, and Llangollen, and then through the small town of Chirk, where the colours and architecture changes, before crossing into England near Oswestry.

We decide to stop for the night again, and so drive into Shrewsbury and book into another cheap hotel. We wash, and sit and read our newspapers, and later we walk around the medieval town centre and eat in a small Indian restaurant at the end of the high street. After the meal, we return to our room in the hotel, where I hold Aisling as she sleeps on me.

‘England's not so bad, is it, Johnny?' she asks when we wake.

‘Not bad at all,' I reply, remembering our walk the previous evening. ‘They have been careful to preserve their history, I'll give them that.' Shrewsbury is a beautiful town, and I haven't seen such urban care and sensitive development in Ireland. We are poor planners, and Irish towns are exhibitions of our inadequacies.

‘Everywhere has a history, Johnny,' Aisling says, holding me. ‘Everywhere and everyone.'

Aisling's words are echoes, and I pull her close and kiss her head. But I know that we are not alone: I know that every word between us is carried by the ghost of Cora.

We leave Shrewsbury in the mid-morning, pointing the Renault towards London. Approaching Birmingham, the traffic builds on the multi-lane motorway. Our little car is surrounded by huge, roaring trucks that all appear to have the need to get somewhere fast.

‘This is more like it,' I say. ‘I knew England would be a hell hole.'

She laughs, before going quiet for some minutes. ‘Do you think we have a future, Johnny?' she asks. ‘Together? Are we the future?'

‘Yes, Aisling.'

‘And you won't go back to war, will you, Johnny?'

‘No, Aisling,' I tell her, though I am unsure of either answer.

We stop at a service station for lunch and to give the Renault a rest. We buy sandwiches and coffees, and stand in the cold air. It begins to rain, so I run to the car for the Dunn & Co and scarf, putting the coat over Aisling and wrapping the scarf around my own neck. Aisling turns and kisses me, and I am unable but to remember the first kiss with Cora as we sat on her garden wall as she, too, was draped in the Dunn & Co coat. I stand close to Aisling, and she rests against me as we eat and drink and watch the motorway traffic come and go.

We make it to London, and after some route misadventures find our way to Chiswick, stopping in the high street for a quick look. Though it's in such a big city, this place has the look and feel of a village, and it immediately appeals to us.

‘I like it already,' I tell her.

‘Yes,' she says. ‘Me, too.'

Arlington Gardens is a tidy avenue of large Victorian townhouses next to a village green, and we park in the drive of number seven. The house has been divided into five bedsits, with Aisling's cousin's on the first floor. We enter a large room with a bay window that has a view down the avenue to the green. A double bed is on the near wall, a kitchenette with sink is built into the far-right corner, a grey-marble fireplace below a gilded mirror is on the right wall, and a writing desk and bookshelves align the left. Beyond the bed and before the window, there is a pink couch.

‘You know something,' she says, ‘it's not unlike your room in Ennis.'

‘I forget sometimes that you've been to Station Road. Thanks again for getting my stuff — that was good of you and Conor. And you got to meet my Banner friends.'

‘Well, they all seem to be very fond of you,' she says, though she and I know she speaks only of Bella.

‘Yes,' I tell her. ‘They are a simple-enough lot. They are easily pleased.'

‘Is that a fact now, Donnelly?'

But I don't allow the enquiry to go any further. I move to her, and kiss her mouth and then her face and her neck, pushing her back onto the bed, where I untie her boots and pull away the socks, kissing the arches of her feet and her ankles, unbuckling her jeans as she fights to get the duvet across her. I untie my own boots, kicking them across the room, and I join her under the duvet, where we undress each other and I kiss her body, and I kiss her face and her mouth as I enter her, and she holds me tightly as I slide on the edge of a glorious madness. In the night, between sleep and awareness, she pulls me to her and I enter her slowly, and I stay inside her, barely moving, and I am somewhere in some sort of dreamland.

We stay in Chiswick for a week and do all the things tourists do in London — except for visiting the royal attractions, which would have been a step too far for any decent Irish republican. In the evenings we walk along the river to Hammersmith Bridge before returning along the high street. We drink beer in the Robin Hood and Little John bar, where we meet Irishmen from every corner and creed. And it is here that I notice a strange paradox: all that separates us Irish at home is abandoned in the English capital. And I don't know why. Maybe it is because to the English we are all the same anyway: we are all Paddies. Or maybe, and more likely, the relocation is a good excuse for the Irish to relieve themselves of a useless weight.

At the end of the week we return by the same road, stopping again in Shrewsbury and Holyhead before taking the ferry home to Dublin, where we spend a day in cafés and bookshops, and we sleep that night in Aisling's bed.

I am walking on a rutted and unkempt road. High hedges fold in from the sides; blackthorn, hazel, hawthorn, and elder reach into the roadway and long shoots of bramble bow from ditch to ground. A shaded tunnel is formed by the growth, and I shiver as a bitter breeze blows through me. I see brightness ahead — some sort of a clearing— and I rush to it, but the bramble catches and rips as I go. I pull the bramble from my legs and arms, cutting my hands and limbs as the hooked thorns grip and tear. I break into the clearing to see an untidy hamlet of decrepit cottages. A terrible silence hangs in the breeze. I approach the first two cottages. The doors are open, the cottages are cold and empty, and a rotten stench clings to everything. Burned, broken pieces of furniture lie in fireplaces long unused. I see nothing but abandoned desolation, and the sick patina of damp death is layered on everything like a pox. There are a half-dozen cottages at varying angles around what at one time must have been a hamlet square. The square is now a thicket of thistle, nettle, dock, and ragwort. Saplings of birch and ash and oak rise through the weed. I go to every cottage. All have the same cold and empty neglect. I try to look past the hamlet into the land, but there is nothing to see but grey fog. A single drooping willow rises from an embankment at the end of the hamlet, and I walk to it through tufts of wet, rough grass.

As I near the willow I see a shape on the ground by a mound of earth. It is a woman: a filthy, dishevelled woman, barely covered by clothing of dirty, torn rags. Her hair is clumped with mud; her face is creviced and littered with weeping sores. Her small body is but lumpy bones wrapped in a thin, grey, broken, skin. Is she dead? I approach her and see that a tin can is tied around her neck with some rough cord. Slowly she moves her head towards me. She is alive. She faces me. Her eyes are colourless and blind, and when she opens her mouth, her teeth are a rotten yellow and black.

‘
Líon mo chopán
,' she says in a coarse choke.

‘What?' I say. ‘Sorry, I don't speak Irish.
Níl a lán Gaeilge agam.
'

‘
Líon mo chopán
,' she repeats, before closing her eyes and exhaling a long, wheezy breath. Her left arm falls into some sort of a pit beyond her, and then her body slides towards it. I rush to her and catch her, and I am holding this frail, human mess of grey, creviced skin over lumpy bones when I look down. The pit is some eight feet long by perhaps three feet wide, but it is dark and deep, endlessly deep, and as I look into it I am pushed, and I fall into that deep darkness and I am rushing down past sides of black earth. I fall a long way before I feel a hold on me, and I am suddenly caught and suspended as I near my crash with the bottom. My vision clears, and I can see through the blackness and I can see movement below me. I stare around me, and look across a vast space. Down here, the walls of black earth cannot be seen, and the pit appears infinitely wide in all directions, and in all that space there is a great mass of writhing, naked, human bodies. They are all alive, all their faces are contorted in agony and terror and madness, and they are all screaming. Great swells, like great ocean storms, move through the mass, and waves rise and fall, bringing other bodies to the top and pulling the top bodies down to some awful depth. Many see me above them, and point and roar and curse and spit and reach to pull me down.

‘No,' I shout. ‘Please, God, no.'

And I am lifted away and up with an almighty force.

By the pit's edge, I lie on the muddy embankment by the frail, dying woman. She has her hand on my chest.

‘You wouldn't do a bad thing?' she asks. ‘Would you, Johnny?'

‘Cora,' I shout.

I wake up to find Aisling holding me.

‘It's just a dream, Johnny. It's all okay.'

I don't sleep for the rest of the night. I can't. What was that about? Where was that? And who was that? It was so real. Was that Cora?

‘What does
Líon mo chopán
mean?' I ask Aisling in the morning.