King of Morning, Queen of Day (31 page)

“Come, brother.” He rested a hand on Gonzaga’s shoulders. The small tramp lowered his head, mumbled a few tongue-tied words, then looked with affection into his taller partner’s eyes.

“Yes, it really is the time.”

Gonzaga muttered again, the words incomprehensible, but the tone unmistakable:
at last.

They helped each other to undress, stripping off layers of torn tweed and holey woolens, frayed shirts and wads of newspaper. Gonzaga laid his knapsack and bandolier of tea caddies in a reverential heap. Tiresias placed his spectacles in their vellum pouch gently on top. The Emily thing hooted in derision; the Damian thing spat at them. In the end they were two naked old men, gooseflesh and wattles, slack breasts and translucent hair, shivering in the cold mist. They lay down side by side on the saturated turf curled into fetuses, recapitulating at the last the birth they had never known, and closed their eyes. Dew settled on their bodies, trickled down flanks cold, white, and hard as porcelain. Flesh colour ebbed into colourlessness, then into a granite grey. The turf grew up about their sides, their contours slackened and slumped, and at the end, there was no memory of Tiresias and Gonzaga, but only two more round grey boulders embedded in moss on the side of Ben Bulben that might have fallen a thousand years ago from the face of the mountain, watched over by the stark verticals of their totems.

“No,” whispered Jessica. “You didn’t have to do that. Why did you have to do that?” It was only in their fading, their failing, that the full realisation of the years they had held watch over her life fell upon her—the greatness of their humility, the unstinting loyalty of their endless journeying through the mythlines. She saw what manner of love they had lavished upon her and was deeply unworthy. She would have paid any asking for them not to have faded, failed, ebbed, and dissolved back into the landscape from which she had created them so many years before. “No!” But then she heard a whisper, the memory of a whisper, in the greyness of the mists that enveloped her.
Not gone, not gone, merely changed, transformed from one glory into another. Only for a time, and a time, and a little time. As long as you have need of us, we will never desert you.
A whisper that only she could hear. A promise that only she could redeem.

She would try to be worthy of the power they had released in her.

A cry. The cry of a fox run down, the cry of the boar trapped in the forest thicket.

The Damian thing held up its hands in anguish. The bronze, leaf-shaped sword fell to the ground and was turned to rust in an instant. His fingers stiffened, hardened, turned to wood. His leather and bronze sandals split open; white rootlets quested forth and buried themselves in the ground. His arms, his legs, were sheathed in bark; his outstretched fingers elongated into twigs and sprouted leaves. Within the duration of one cry, he had turned into a wind-blasted mountain ash. With the fading of the cry into the mist, a branch broke from the knothole that had been his mouth.

Then Jessica felt the visions that had waited so long, so patiently, at the corners and junctions of her life, rise up in a flock and break free. A terrible, exultant joy burned up in her. She gathered the flocking, swarming visions in the grip of her imagination and stretched them into robes and wings of fire. Anything. Anything at all she desired, she could have. The visions came to her call and settled on her hands and arms, and she saw that they were shaped like birds, like the endless possible worlds of the Mygmus.

She stepped away from the stone, toward the Emily thing, spread her phoenix wings wide.

“Yes,” she said. “Oh yes, yes yes …”

She saw her father and mother—the woman who had pretended to be her mother, the man who had pretended to be her father, the girls who had pretended to be her sisters; she saw Dr. Hannibal Rooke and Miss Fanshawe and tiny yapping Cromlyn; she saw Fat Lettie and Mr. Mangan and the Reverend Perrot and Em and Rozzie and their Colms and Patricks and all the ones who had ever betrayed her or hurt her or ignored her or disbelieved her or pretended they had liked her when all along they had despised her, had laughed at the girl who had had to make up such outrageous lies as the price of their friendship. She saw them all, and the things and places she could wish upon them if she but touched them with the tiniest edge of her desire. And she saw the Emily thing, the Mother thing, and saw in her the sister she should have had, and their faces, looking upon each other, were like an image and its mirror reflection. And she saw the hillside open behind her mother, her sister, and within, a gulf of light unending.

“Yes,” said the Emily thing. “Yes, yes … yes.”

The voice was that of a very small child, leading her new friend to the ferris wheels and coconut shies and dodgem cars of the fairground of the heart.

“No,” said a voice, a voice full of amazement at its own sound, as if in possession of something it still did not fully comprehend. Hannibal Rooke’s voice. “No, Jessica. Don’t you see? She doesn’t care for you. She’s never cared for you. Never, Jessica, never.”

Jessica turned her light full upon Hannibal Rooke, but he stood small and anonymous and shadowy and uncowed as a Covenanting preacher. Her father stared blinded and striving into the light.

“No, she doesn’t care, she never cared.” Hannibal Rooke’s words came spilling out like water from the singing fountains of Rome, tumbling over each other in their haste to express themselves. “The only reason she wants you back is because she can no longer bear the loneliness of the Mygmus. Endless worlds, endless possibilities—oh, yes, I don’t deny it—but never to have anything, anyone, that you have not created yourself with whom to share it. She wants you because she can not bear to be totally and irrevocably alone forever. All for her, Jessica, all for her. Never a thought of you, of your life, your needs and dreams, your hopes and ambitions.”

The Emily thing shrieked, “You’re lying, you’re lying, you’re lying. I’ve loved her, I’ve always loved her, she was my child.”

Hannibal Rooke stabbed his finger through the veils of glory: the accusation.

“Then why did you send her away from you? Why did you send her into a world without a mother, father, a family; alone, a child of three mothers, dear God!”

“Because I wanted what was best for her!”

The accusation did not waver.

“That is a lie, I submit. You did not want to share what you had found with another, even with your own daughter. No, it was your own world, the private world you had always dreamed of where you could escape from all responsibilities, and you could not tolerate the responsibility of a child in your own personal wonderland, could you? You could not bear the thought that something might spoil your enjoyment of the paradise you had created for yourself, I would submit.” The Emily thing raged, and her rage shook the very hills.

“You’re a horrid, horrid man, Hannibal Rooke, horrid.”

“And I would further submit that your so-called love for your daughter only began when you realised that what you had thought of as eternal heaven showed itself to be a very subtle kind of hell. Yes, Miss Desmond, hell. Hell is not other people. Heaven is other people. Hell is oneself. Forever and always, oneself. Self. Self. That has been the entire motive of your … I hesitate to call it
life. Existence,
since you gained the ability to be and do exactly what you liked.”

“I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you,” the Emily thing screamed over and over and over and over, and her voice was the voice of a five-year-old’s tantrum.

“Is it true? Mother, is it true?” The birds that had swirled and swooped within the mist now felt to Jessica to be beating and flailing inside her stomach. “Is this true?”

“Lies. Lies, all lies, every word of it, lies!” the Emily thing shrieked.

“It is the truth,” said Hannibal Rooke, and it was he who had grown to the dimensions of a god—a stern, Bible-black Calvinist patriarch—and the Emily thing reduced to a spanked four-year-old sent to snivel in the corner.

Then the one voice that had yet gone unheard on the hillside spoke.

“Jessica, only you can decide that,” Charlie Caldwell said. “No constraints, no obligations; this time the choices are all yours.”

“I’m going to turn you all into something so horrible you won’t even dare to look at yourselves,” shouted the Emily thing. “I’m going to send you all to hell forever and ever and ever and ever. Amen.” “No,” Jessica said, “I’m not going to let you do that.” The light intensified to a point where it became more than light—a sound, a dull roar, a hot, flaying wind. Hannibal Rooke clapped hand over eyes.

“For God’s sake, close your eyes, man!”

“I can’t, don’t you see. The light is always there!”

The rocks beneath their feet groaned and stirred. The air hissed and seethed. The two men felt the skin on their faces, their hands, scorch and blister. They braced themselves against the burning wind. In their mutual blindness they felt unclean winged things brush past them, snatches of goblin laughter whisper in their ears. The earth heaved and moaned; the sky tore itself apart in lightning and thunder. Caldwell’s ecstatic cry was barely audible over the battle song of Otherworlds grinding past each other: “I can’t see! No light, nothing, I can’t see!”

And it ended.

The two men uncovered their eyes. The backs of their hands were seared raw red. Their faces itched; there was a smell of singed cloth and hair.

“What do you see?” Hannibal Rooke asked, carefully.

“Mist,” Caldwell replied. “And birds.”

The turf was littered with the bodies of dead birds. Hannibal Rooke knelt to inspect one. It was frozen solid, a tight, glazed bullet of flesh and feather.

“Jessica,” Caldwell asked. “Emily?”

Rooke shook his head. The solitary mountain ash close by the foot of the Bridestone was dead also, shivered to the pith by fire. Its blackened trunk smoked; red lozenges of ember glowed and flaked away. Fire had passed over the two totem staffs. Hannibal Rooke picked up a metal tea canister lying on the turf, dropped it with a start. It was colder than ice. But the rocks remained—the Bridestone; the two low, glacier-worn granite boulders, were unchanged.

“God, are we dead?” Caldwell asked suddenly.

The mist moved across the hillside, changeless in its everchangingness. And, in the changing changelessness, an area of stability, certainty; a dark shape. A dark shape approaching. Terror seized the two men’s souls. The dark approaching shape loomed huge in the distorted perspective of the mist, and became human.

The human broke into a run.

Jessica hurled herself upon her father and he swallowed her up in his arms. And at that most intimate range too close for words, tears and touching and the deep, wordless expression of the soul were all the communication they needed. A wind sprang up, whipped the reluctant mist like a sow dawdling to market. Rents of blue appeared above; the sun seemingly raced across the clearing sky. The mist tore on the jagged tips of the trees, minute by minute the world made itself more visible.

Father to daughter:
What happened?

Daughter to father:
Don’t ask. I can never say.

Father:
Can’t say, won’t say?

Daughter:
Can’t say. I decided. That’s all.

He:
You decided for me? For us?

She:
I decided for me. I decided for life.

The mist was gone, the sky early high-summer-afternoon blue. Memories of
heat,
of
warmth,
of
summer
began to steal across the hillside. Across the bay, Knocknarea rose green and purple and beyond if, the hills of County Mayo. And beyond them, the ocean; and beyond the great ocean, a new land, a new world, where summer was also come. And beyond that, other oceans, other lands, other summers, and seasons; the great sea, the wide world. Enough for any life. Down there, where the ribbons of road laced between the fields, it all began.

With one footstep.

They walked down among the bodies of the birds, to the trees where it all would begin to happen.

T
HEY HAD CYCLED SO
far, through the old Victorian suburbs and the new municipal housing developments spilling like salt across the lower slopes of the mountains, out of Dublin, up into the mountains, along the old military road, and where the road could no longer take them they had abandoned the bicycles by the side of an old stone bridge and walked on, up into the heath and the heather, two figures on a hillside, wading thigh-deep through bee-busy purple heather, she with the rug and the thermos, he with the picnic basket he’d carried balanced so carefully on the back of his bicycle all those miles climbing up up up away from the city into the mountains of County Wicklow, and the bees were humming, and high above a lark was diving up through the clear air, up up up, the sun was so hot and the scent of the moorland flowers so powerful she felt she must swoon and fall among the bracken and springy purple heather, was he not done yet, not he; forging on tireless as an ox, up up up over the boulders and crumbling black peat, up up up into the land of the lark and the myrtle, the high places where sheep with patches of red or blue on their rumps looked up from their coarse grazing and cantered skittishly away, shit-clogged tails swinging heavily; she looked at him, his shadow against the sun, strong, tireless as an ox this Owen MacColl, son of builders, red-brick, utility-built with sure and solid foundations, no major structural defects and all internal and external timbers guaranteed free from rot for ten years; she could watch him forever, toiling up the sheep paths through the bog-myrtle, she loved to watch the way his body moved, solidly, certainly, she wished he would take his shirt off, she would have loved to have seen the play of light on his sweat, loved to have caught the perfume of that sweat, honey-sweet, salt-sour, on the light airs of the hills; even though she knew he stripped to the waist in summer like the rest of squad she knew he would never do it alone with her, it is one thing with a gang of mates; it is quite another with a woman beneath God’s blue sky with the lark ascending; oh, he was daring enough—he’d kissed her, mouth open, like they do in France, that first time, in the Atheneum Ballroom, she hadn’t expected it, he had taken her by surprise, for a moment she hadn’t been sure she liked the quick, hard dart of his tongue into her mouth, but she knew Em and Rozzie were watching (Colm the apprentice tiler was long history, once again Em was coursing the spangled dance floor like a shark, five months’ gone and Rozzie’s baby still didn’t show, her Hoover salesman had found Liverpool the better part of valour, but her father knew a surgeon on Harcourt Street) and she was damned if she was going to look like a clumsy fifteen-year-old in front of two girls who claimed to have actually
done
it, though proof positive of having departed the blessed state of virginhood was only conclusive in one instance, so she had pressed her tongue into his mouth and felt his teeth close gently on it and she’d felt something not quite like anything she’d ever felt before ignite a smooth, slow burn, like the engine of a limousine, down below her belly button, and she’d known then that he could do what he liked, whatever he liked, whatever he asked, and she wouldn’t mind, not one bit; hello, what was he at now? he’d found a place for them to eat, where the bank of the stream they had been following had been cut away in a small cliff by the torrents of winter, a quiet place, a secret place, with moss and heather for a bed and rover-smoothed boulders for a table, a table in the wilderness, where was that from? the Bible, was it? she spread the rug on the moss, thinking,
This would be a grand place to do it, where only the sky and the lark can see us,
and as he unpacked plates cups knives forks spoons sugar salt sandwiches cold chicken cold ham cold tongue Scotch eggs from Dlugash the Butchers fruit brack faery cakes tins of Bournville chocolate, she stood on the stream-polished boulders and looked down the little valley the stream had cut to the greater valley below where two threads, many threads, of silver were spun into a single cord and the cars moved like sluggish black beetles, furious with the heat, through the haze and shimmer bouncing from the Military Road, he called her and everything was ready and laid out for her pleasure, with the sole exception of himself, and as she ate the sandwiches and the chicken and the ham and the tongue and the Scotch eggs from Dlugash the Butchers and the fruit brack and the faery cake and the Bournville chocolate and drank the tea from the thermos, she watched the way his lips closed upon the food, could not tear her eyes away from the way his lips closed upon those morsels of food, and she knew one word and only one word kept what they wanted to happen from happening, and neither of them dared to ask the other what that word might be for fear that they might speak it, so that her hand shook when she held up her cup to ask for more tea and his hand shook as he poured it from the thermos, and hot tea with milk and
two
sugars spilled over his shirt, his suspenders, his flannels, soaked and burning in the same instant, and he leaped up with a cry and she leaped up with a cry and said “Take it off, your shirt, off, get it off,” and he took his shirt off, and then she said, “Take them off, your pants, off, get them off,” and he took them off and she said, “Take them off, all your clothes, off, take them off,” and he did, and she looked at him standing there under the river cliff, cut by many winters, in the beauty of his nakedness, and the word neither of them had dared speak was spoken and she came to him and he to her and they went down together on the bed of heather and bracken, on the rug she had carried up from the city on the back of her bicycle, like lovers from old old legends, and under the hot sun with the bees swimming lazily about them, heavy with nectar, she opened to him and he entered her and pushed pushed pushed and she went oh oh oh afraid that she was going to die afraid that she was not going to die from something wonderful and terrible at the same time, like God, she thought on the heather and bracken bed with her knees up and he pumping pumping pumping away and up up up she was going to explode, a rain of Jessica Caldwell age seventeen and three-quarters coming down in red rags and scraps all over the heather and the stray sheep, oh oh oh and then he came half in and half out and as he did she felt something go
click!
in her head and with that click the visions that had been crowding in around the edge of her field of view for so long she could never remember a time when they were not there disappeared; gone, vanished, and she cried a little and he died a little and that was all the poetry that was in it; then she looked over his shoulders and through the tears, the unexpected tears, she saw two boulders and two trees and two birds in the clear air and two figures tiny tiny walking away far far out across the summer hillsides.