Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: 2023-booker-longlist‎ (13)

Perhaps she loved the mystery of them all. He feels strongly that Mirzakhani's was a planet, most likely earth.
Noelle Doyle was unable to tell anyone what exactly she thought about in those last seconds of her life. Jamie must now imagine it. He is sure that whatever she thought it was energetic and filled with the colour blue - he is surest, that she saw the depths of the pool.
That living and dying are like swimming for a swimmer.
Or beautiful patterns for a mathematician.
That they are the sea to a boat builder, sanding for a carpenter and tunes for a musician.
He thinks that you may be flooded with one or more considerations in your last moments, made up of the energy of your previous moments. Which is all you can ever have.

I should have continued to invent something alone, a boat is not an invention of any kind, really, if you think about it, and no matter how many times Mr Foley has tried to convince me it is, I remain unconvinced. I am also annoyed at my lack of originality, and this one that we are to create the back on today (as opposed to break the back) seems ancient, which is definitely not an invention.

At which time, the bottom bunk of Jamie's bed, once considered for sleepovers, was relegated / elevated for Jamie's Books of Great Importance. The books were left in piles along the bare mattress like tortoises with meticulous handwritten notes pressed on their immaculate covers:

Date and Place of Publication. Date Started. Date Completed, Initial Reaction and most pressing - Jamie O'Neill's Star Ratings. The Star Ratings were harsh and among the piles, only one book received five hand-drawn Jamie O'Neill Stars: The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.

A sudden, swooping look from her father. Tell me, he says, do you believe in reality? Dad, what is that supposed to mean? It is a simple question, you took the degree, you understand what it means. When you put it like that, yes, I know what you mean, but spare me the lecture. He looks away momentarily towards the sideboard stacked high with yellowing newspapers, dog-eared current affairs magazines, the old smile pulling to reveal his teeth. We are both scientists, Eilish, we belong to a tradition but tradition is nothing more than what everyone can agree on - the scientists, the teachers, the institutions, if you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing, Eilish, it is really quite simple, the NAP is trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, if you say one thing is another thing and you say it enough times, then it must be so, and if you keep saying it over and over people accept it as true - this is an old idea, of course, it really is nothing new, but you're watching it happen in your own time and not in a book.

“Brexit, Trump, and the forces gathering on the horizon: The Freedom Party in Austria. The National Front in France. The People’s Party in Denmark. Golden Dawn in Greece. Jobbik in Hungary. Law and Justice in Poland. Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. A tectonic shift was occurring in western democracies. I thought, too, about the implosion of Syria and the west’s largely indifferent response to its refugee crisis. The citizen’s regret is the novelist’s calling. I wanted to understand where all this might lead.”

The window whispering the rain. She comes to be languid with the sense of being before memory, a hollow body filling with the sound of the rain until memory awakens and she is at spill, moving across the landing to see into the boys' room and Mark's empty bed.

she looks at her infant son, this child who remains an innocent and she sees how she has fallen afoul of herself and grows aghast, seeing that out of terror comes pity and out of pity comes love and out of love the world can be redeemed again, and she can see that the world does not end, that it is vanity to think the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life, that what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time, the coming of the sword, the world devoured by fire, the sun gone down into the earth at noon and the world cast in darkness, the fury of some god incarnate in the mouth of the prophet raging at the wickedness that will be cast out of sight, and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore,

Of course, now I know Vita's little bird-heart, I remember those one-sided conversations differently. I see that my frequent muteness was a convenience to someone who was soft-feathered and sharp-eyed. And who sang away to herself in my presence, happily and without interruption, for she knew I had no song with which to call back. Birds have traditionally been banned from Italian households, whether as pets, paintings or ornaments. They are believed to bring the Evil Eye, the malocchio curse with them. I faithfully observe every Italian custom I have ever learned: cook seven fishes on Christmas Eve and lentils on 1 January; eat rice and no flour on St Lucia's Day; take chrysanthemums to my sister's grave on the Day of the Dead, and know it is seventeen and not thirteen that is unlucky. I would not have knowingly allowed even the image of a bird into my home, however beautiful. But I lived for and loved a bird-heart that summer; I only knew it afterwards.

My condition does not accompany me into the greenhouses but waits at the door. When I am alone or at work, he sleeps outside with his dark head low on his paws; he resents the lack of challenge in the greenhouse environment, where no one speaks in riddles or looks at me oddly. Here is a magical space without social context or burdens. But in the company of others, the animal is fixed to my side. He is a smiling partner whose iron hand on me looks like affection, yet functions as a reminder of who I really am. The wolf-husband's wiry whiskers graze my skin as he whispers into my ear, talk about Italy go on go on don't look at their eyes oh no don't they don't like it at all look at the floor, the wall and isn't that music loud Sunday and aren't those lights too, too bright . . . ?

Her mouth speaks of that which fills her heart,' my mother used to warn us. This line had been a family dinner favourite with her during my silent periods. For Ma, such quietness evidenced that my heart was empty, while within the bosom of my talkative sister beat an organ full of filial love. And perhaps this is what Ma intuited when she spoke of my empty heart, that there was no place for her within it. She did not know I would have a little daughter with a tendency to fall unexpectedly and sweetly asleep, at my breast, at mealtimes and during conversations or games, as if in sudden collapse. A child who could fall asleep even while opening presents; her snoring gently blowing the ripped paper up and down beside her face. Dolly's habitual surrender to sleep was what broke something hard within me, this damage to my heart that I never want fixed. These daily infant acts of faith rushed like water into the empty heart my mother assigned me. She, herself, knew all about housing vacant chambers where love should be. Even my father knew that my mother's heart contained only lake-water, running cold and lonely inside her. His was a different kind of bird-heart; it was full and loving, but available solely to his wife.

It begins with ‘What are you?’ hollered from the perimeter of your front yard when you're nine younger, probably. You'll be asked again throughout junior high and high school, then out in the world, in strip clubs, in food courts, over the phone, and at various menial jobs. The askers are expectant. They demand immediate gratification. Their question lifts you slightly off your preadolescent toes, tilting you, not just because you don't understand it, but because even if you did understand this question, you wouldn't yet have an answer

The tequila courses through you, making you feel as though you are simultaneously on Morgan's couch and diffused across the universe, on an infinite trajectory away from your troubles. In this state of multiplicity you see clearly enough what will happen, though once the vision passes, you will forget too quickly and completely to prevent it from occurring .........…………But for now, you are on Morgan's couch, listening to the salt grinding between granite and glass, a moment away from losing this premonition, this portal to your future, now my past. Tell him across the expanse of time and distance, as I am telling you now, all that I can't say to him. Start with the resentment and the feelings of neglect and your resulting recklessness. Recount every injury, every scar you carved into each other. And when you're finished, and you are certain your father has heard, do what might divert you from the path to self-destruction: forgive yourselves

I knew from his silence that he wasn't going to move first, and all I could do was serve and volley or disappoint him. The smudges on the wall blurred one into the other and I thought that surely I would fall. That was when it started up. A steady, melancholy rhythm from the other court, the shot and its echo, over and over again, like some sort of deliverance. I could tell it was one person conducting a drill. And I knew who it was. I stood there, listening, and the sound poured into me, into my nerves and bones, and it was with a feeling of having been rescued that I raised my racket and served.

… I thought my child would heal my broken heart. I didn't stop to ask if this was asking too much of her. I didn't stop to think about what was passed on in my milk, the hurt, the loss, the anxiety. I remember feeding her, looking around for my own mother, crying as I hadn't for years, the tears falling on my baby's head, and I never thought those tears would leave a trace. I thought they would disappear as easily as I brushed them away with my hand.

Here comes a candle
To light you to bed
And here comes a chopper
To chop off your head

At the start of the poem [Pearl] the grieving parent goes to the garden, or grave, and hears beautiful music in the silence there. The herbs and flowers planted there smell sweet, and his mind is filled with music. I always thought the songs he heard at that moment were really important, and in my mind the herb garden and the songs went together. But when I translated that section I found the mention of songs was fleeting – barely a line! The songs at the start of the sections and the references to the folk songs the mother passes on and especially those songs concerning burial rituals, are all in the book because of this tiny part of the poem. In terms of structure I wanted to create sections in the novel that would work something like the sections of the poem, with the songs as the link words, or clips that hold the pearls together in a rosary-like sequence. That is why, in the final section there is a reference to a key song from the opening, so it ties together. Well, I hope it ties together

Was my mother a practising pagan? I don't think so. She sang old songs. She talked to every living thing. To the tree before she broke its branches. To the roots hanging into the cave. To single magpies, obviously. Doesn't everyone? To the little people. If she lost her favourite trowel in the garden again she would say, 'Now where have you little menaces moved that trowel of mine?'

There's an exercise the therapists make you do. Where you are allowed to blame everyone. I have played that game, or tried to. Who do I blame for my mother's disappearance? My mother, first off. My father, for not knowing she might. For being at work. Mrs Wynne, for not seeing her set off. Myself, for looking at some cut-out dolls instead of watching her every move. Joe, for staying asleep all afternoon. Her midwife, for not fighting her way down our muddy lane to fill in the questionnaire to assess post-natal depression risk. If such a thing existed at the time. The GP she had seen three days before to weigh Joe, who noticed nothing out of the ordinary. My brother Jonathan, for not drawing breath.

But none of them is to blame. I am not even sure what is the point of the blame exercise. I didn't like playing it. Who does it help? What if no one is to blame? I prefer the word accident. or the official one. Misadventure. Death by misadventure. Because I like the word adventure. That describes her well. My mother’s life was an adventure. But it went wrong.

So, here is another arrival on our little island, Esther thought. Our little island on this little earth. This little earth, hung somewhere deep in the fathomless heavens. Here is another arrival this girl, this child-ripening within her own body the seed of another arrival, another child, each and every life comprehensive, each peculiar, each priceless, and each less than the shadow of a shadow, all cherished or despised, celebrated or aggrieved, memorialized or entirely forgotten.

Eha’s life and the lives of everyone on the island and everything they’ve done and enjoyed and suffered and nearly starved from and all the full moons and bright suns and green grass and blue skies and rain and snow and wind and clouds, tin cups, lead sinkers, cod and lobsters and clams and whelks and driftwood all begin to erupt in slow motion from the infinitely dense black point in Eha’s thought that is the meaning of this eviction, which at first his brain could not divulge to his understanding but is splitting open and disgorging as he sits looking at his house remembering so many things. Now he looks at his house and can feel Zachary’s sorrow, as if from inside, instead of just knowing that he’s a sad man from the outside, and can feel the comfort of his tree and as he understands that, looking at the house he and Zachary built together, that Zachary taught him how to make, he realizes not the fact but the meaning of the fact that this house before him, from which he and his mother and daughters are to be evicted and which once empty will be set afire and burn from home to square of ash, is made of the tree that he and Zachary felled on the main, deep in a part of the woods Zachary knew about from the old uncles and grandpas and Penobscots who lived by themselves away from any town or settlement. He realizes, too, that he was once a son missing a father but Zachary has been his real father all these years since, and he realizes that he now is a father missing a son.

Wicked shepherds! Burn me at the stake and hang me from a tree. Clap me in the stocks; send me down the mine; set me in the burning fields. But I am queer. And I say, Here is water, bread, a dull penny. Here’re my old shirt, my plane and hammer, a roof I’ll help you raise above your head. Here is my queer old body, in a barn, behind a hedge, beneath a shadow, on a bare pallet—quick—while the murderous king still sleeps. Here is a song, a painting, a jig and a reel. Here is an island for an apple, an orchard for an eye. Here is a single, perfect apple for an island.

Now, here the mainlanders were, on Apple Island, in the form of this courteous, plain white man who turned Esther’s guts because he reminded her of her father and whose coming surely forecasted disaster. Courteous, and innocent, really, Esther thought, but innocent as in, as in—she searched for the word and it came to her from Shakespeare, from Hamlet—innocent as in artless. He was not innocent in the sense of being blameless, but in the sense of being oblivious to the greater, probably utter, catastrophe into which the, yes, artless graciousness of bringing the school and lessons would draw them all.

Esther saw them all on the raft as they might be seen from the shore, or higher, from over the water, from above the ocean, castaways, a bitter old harridan and her grown brother son and two granddaughters, a mutt, and a pregnant stranger, adrift together on a raft piled with their home in pieces, the house a gesture toward and persistence at the kind of home they’d all wanted for themselves since they’d come to the rock, the island, and clung to it, always knowing that sooner or later they’d be noticed, for the worse, and be expelled back out onto the waters. Esther lifted her face and looked back at her home. That poor island, she said. That poor little island of such poor dear souls. Driven from our home, our ark, our little basket in the bullrushes. All for some kind of hotel, they say.

The sun rose and set every day. The moon, too. The tides went out and came in. The seasons turned in order. Some of the trees lost their leaves in the autumn and grew them back in the spring. People ate breakfast and supper when they had food and smoked and drank their tea. They had babies and raised them. They worked and slept. They sang and laughed and yelled and wept and fought and coupled. But from the first time she’d heard it, Esther Honey understood that if the man Jesus had died and been buried then really and truly rose, it was the only time such a thing had ever happened and that meant everything else in the world took its real meaning from that young man lying dead in his grave and awakening back to life and rolling the stone away from his tomb and saying goodbye to his friends and helpers not in spirit but actually in that body that had died and come back to life.

My favourite species were those that lay dormant in husk form before reanimating, such as the rotifers discovered in Arctic ice-sheets after 24,000 lifeless years. Able to withstand almost any force, they seemed to challenge the distinction between life and death, annihilating the concept of straight and linear time to suggest something more circular and repetitious instead.

I will never forget her pleasure at the inevitable twist in each episode. The fact that this person could still be surprised by little things like this, someone considered to be old, seemed incongruous and unlikely, even absurd. She was still a child.
We all were. This never changes, it never leaves us, this sense of beginning, of always beginning, of always being young.

At this, I felt a sudden pang of recognition: self-reinforcing, a circular process. If the material degrades, then rather than replacing it, with all the waste involved, let it correct itself. I'd already been using a plastic that was part-synthesised from algae; the next step was to rebuild it entirely using the same stuff.

Still, I should be focusing on where I was going, the new life awaiting me, the work I'd always wanted and that seemed almost too good to be true. With the promise of virtually unlimited backing of my research, this was the easiest decision I'd ever made, even if I knew almost nothing about the organisation funding me. Fenna wouldn't have wanted the alternative, a world where I continued to work at the university, regretting the incredible opportunity that had passed me by. So while I waited in Departures, scanning the listings, gripping my luggage tightly at my knees, I tried to endorse the decision, tried to commit to it and feel the excitement of a new life just beginning. I thought of Endeavour, where all this had started, but however hard I concentrated on the submersible rising, carrying its material from the radical depths, Fenna's image intruded, returning me to my childhood and telling me this was all just futile escape, that every time I tried to push my past into insignificance I only committed to it further. My work inevitably returned me to what I fled, my obsession with origins and life's formation; all that mattered, I supposed, after ever. thing, was that the fruits of this, whatever they were based on, had independent merit.

The island was the ideal location to host a returning space-crew: the remoteness of the position, the deep ocean setting, the military presence and the absence of a civilian population. But there seemed to be something else, something consonant between the Proscenium I mission and Ascension. Both of them were scarcely credible, outrageous pieces of fiction. That her sister could have trained for and travelled on a deep-space mission was something she would never fully accept. It seemed only right that the place the crew would land on was similarly hard to believe. The thing about Ascension that provoked her, and disturbed her co-passenger with her laughter, was its exposure of how absurd, and unlikely, human settlement was. Ascension showed her, more than anything else, that her sister's inclusion in the Proscenium mission was no more unlikely, no more demanding of suspended disbelief, than her birth was. She gave one final smile as the wheels touched down on the tarmac in Singapore, still just the first stage, remarking that the original science-fiction story - the impossible adventure full of wonder and awe - was merely the existence of the species, all the moments she and her sister and their family and every other living person had shared.

Over the course of the day I had drilled down deep into the layers of strata, all the way into the bedrock of my memories, recollecting my life in Penang, the people I had known there – Arthur and my brother and Sun Wen. But most of all I had been reliving the two weeks when Willie Maugham and his lover had stayed with us.
‘I received a book today, Robert,’ I say to the empty chair next to mine. ‘One of Willie’s old books. The Casuarina Tree. You remember it?’ I sip my wine, feeling it warm my insides. ‘Forgive me – it was a stupid question. Of course you’d remember it. It wasn’t one of your favourites, was it?

‘Where does a story begin, Willie?’ I asked.
For a while he did not say anything. Then he shifted in his chair. ‘Where does a wave on the ocean begin?’ he said. ‘Where does it form a welt on the skin of the sea, to swell and expand and rush towards shore?’
‘I want to tell you a story, Willie,’ I said. Yes, I thought to myself. Tell him your story. Let him write it. Let the whole world know.
The music I had just played seemed to go on unspooling in the air between us, this song that had no beginning and no ending; the song of time itself.

There is something about the shophouses of Penang I find beautiful and evocative. When Robert had been away at the Front I had spent many a morning with my easel and stool on a street corner in town, sketching and painting watercolours of these shophouses. Built at the turn of the eighteenth century, these buildings blended elements of southern Chinese and Indian architecture. With their exteriors limewashed in a variety of bright colours and embellished with detailed and eye-catching features, they are an artist’s dream. Their first floor formed a narrow porch, creating a connected walkway about five feet wide, what the Hokkiens called ‘goh kaki’. This five-foot way is usually laid with brightly patterned terracotta tiles, while the front doors – often a two-leaf comb door opening up to reveal a plain and more sturdy pair of inner timber doors – are flanked by shuttered windows on both sides. Above the windows usually sit a pair of air vents, shaped to symbolise bats and secured by thin vertical iron bars. The façade of the second floor is taken up by timber louvred shutters and, more often than not, a strip of parapet wall perforated with a row of jade-green ceramic air vents.

People around here had expected me to pack up and return to Penang after I buried Robert. There were days when I asked myself why I didn’t do it. But – sail home … to what? And to whom? Everyone I had known in Malaya was either dead or had disappeared into distant lands and different lives. And then war had broken out all over the world and the Japanese had invaded Malaya. So I had remained here, a daub of paint worked by time’s paintbrush into this vast, eternal landscape.

Here, I thought, as I made my slow way home, my fingers stained by the new, fresh berries, here was what came to the surface after so many throes and convulsions. Soon we would no longer need to withdraw to the desert for a space of contemplation and self-abnegation, Soon, personal ascesis would arrive in the form of one more letter, one more mass mortality event, one more migration stopped by total annihilation. Nature and well-being, the Home Office, any number of crooks and lowlifes. I wanted to be good in the terrible world. I thought of the birds. I accumulated fidelities in this space of diminishing returns. On the one hand, I felt that my obedience had been rewarded at last. On the other, in this cold and beautiful countryside, I feared I was living a life which I had done nothing to earn and I felt sure of some swift and terrible retribution. As I bit into the last strawberry, I began to weep because language, I felt, was no longer at our disposal, because there was nothing in the word that we could use. Nothing settled in place.

My experience of continuity had been limited to the way each new catastrophe sat in the last, as if it had already happened and would go on happening, on and on. And so I lived in the historical rupture of the present, in the historical aberration of my life, and I submitted to those that had me at their mercy in an effort to soften their hearts. But now, for the moment, things were well. I had found a way to serve the community, in silence and at a distance (for had not the sages said that good deeds are better done in anonymity, without gratitude?), in my brother’s absence I had found some form for the days. If in the preceding weeks I had loved too well my walks among the budding trees of the forest, if I had felt the smallest temptation to withdraw my obedience, I knew that once again I had to gain mastery over myself, over the motions of my spirit, various and vain.

Where to begin. I can it is true shed light on my actions only, and even then it is a weak and intermittent one. I was the youngest child, the youngest of many – more than I care to remember – whom I tended from my earliest infancy, before, indeed, I had the power of speech myself and although my motor skills were by then scarcely developed, these, my many siblings, were put in my charge. I attended to their every desire, smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience, with the highest degree of devotion, so that over time their desires became mine, so that I came to anticipate wants not yet articulated, perhaps not even yet imagined, providing my siblings with the greatest possible succour, filling them up only so they could demand more, always more, demands to which I acceded with alacrity and discreet haste … I continued to spend the long years since childhood cultivating solitude, pursuing silence to its ever-receding horizon, a pursuit that demanded a particular quality of attention, a self-forgetfulness on my part that would enable me to bring to bear the most painstaking, the most careful consideration to the other, to treat the other as the worthiest object of contemplation. In this process, I would become reduced, diminished, ultimately I would become clarified, even cease to exist. I would be good. I would be all that had ever been asked of me.

“Àlàkẹ́? Àlàkẹ́?” Yèyé turned away from the balcony, thinking for a moment that her father was standing behind her, calling her name. But it was only Aunty Bíọ́lá reverting to Àlàkẹ́ after calling Yèyé for a while. No one called her Àlàkẹ́ anymore, not since she and her husband received their chieftaincy titles the year Wúràọlá was born. “Ṣéèsí” Aunty Bíọ́lá asked. “I’m all right.” “Kóìtiírí kí o mí wò sìì.” “Aunty Bíọ́lá, don’t worry. Àní, I’m all right. Óyá, let’s take the photo.” Yèyé moved away from the glass door and settled into a chair. Aunty Bíọ́lá handed her a framed photograph, and Yèyé set it on her knee without glancing at it. It was a photo of their mother. From before. Had she even taken any pictures after that diagnosis? Yèyé and her sisters used the same photo at every wedding and major birthday. Their Mother. Seated on a chair in the yà mí tùkatùka pose. Hands on her knees, one gripping a clutch, the other splayed to show the gold rings on every other finger, both wrists decked with beads. Her ìró tied above her waist. Two layers of coral beads nestled against her bùbá. The aṣọ-òkè ìró and gèlè were probably red, but there was no way to tell for sure, since the photo was black-and-white.

And then, at the end of his first term in primary six, just a couple of weeks before Christmas, his father and over four thousand teachers in the state were sacked. At first, everything at home went on as usual.

It was Ẹniọlá’s mother who sold every piece of jewellery she owned and made just enough money from that to cover the registration form for Glorious Destiny Comprehensive Secondary School and tuition for his first term there. The Federal Unity school was just too expensive, but she was not going to send him to one of the tuition-free state schools now.

Soon, they had to move out of the three-bedroom flat that had been home before his father was sacked. When his family moved to the house where they now lived, only a few doors down but nearly a century behind, Ẹniọlá had assumed the move was only temporary. He had believed that after a few months, at most, they would once again live in a house that had indoor bathrooms and at least one water closet. He should have known then, when they left the house that had an indoor kitchen and louvre blades, after the television, bedframes and sofas were sold, before his father tried to sell the VCR and no one would buy it because even video clubs had begun to loan out only Video CDs, he should have known then that his parents would no longer be able to afford the fees for the Unity school in Ìkìrun. But his father taught history. His father taught history, and that laughing man on the radio had not mentioned history on his list of subjects that were useless for the modern age. History still mattered. His father said so.

In any case, his family was well connected. Yèyé knew from his mother that Kúnlé had had multiple job offers of the best kind, the types he did not need to apply for to have. An uncle in Abuja who wanted Kúnlé to head his company’s marketing department. An aunt in NNPC who had a slot she wanted to give him. And now Wúràọlá said he’d stopped trying to get a transfer to Lagos or Abuja, because his father wanted him close by for the campaign. Such a sensible boy and a good son. What was a shot at reading the news at nine to the whole country if he could help his father become state governor? Yes, he would have been perfect if he was a doctor. Just imagine, Wúràọlá as the second half of a Dr. & Dr. (Mrs.) unit. Perfection. But whatever Kúnlé had lost by not studying medicine, he had in family connections that would nudge him up any ladder he chose to climb and cushion any falls before propelling him upward again and again. Yèyé had lived long enough to realise that Aunty Bíọ́lá had always been right: real wealth was intergenerational, and the way Nigeria was set up, your parentage would often matter more than your qualifications.

“Why can’t it be my own house?” Forty-seven. On Sunday morning, when her father asked if she planned to keep her husband waiting as she’d done to him before they left for church together, Mọ́tárá had decided to spend the week keeping a count of how many times anyone in her family would speak about how she planned to behave when she was married. Or living in her husband’s house. Her husband’s house was the destination everyone had been referring to since she was old enough to understand what they meant. If all she had noted that week alone was any indication, the husband’s house was the destination of all good girls when they became women, just as heaven was the destination of all good people when they died. So far, between her parents and the aunts she’d spoken to on the phone that week, she’d counted forty-seven references to how she would behave in her marriage, in her husband’s house, towards her in-laws.

Enough time goes by and it is as if old things never happened. Things once fresh, immediate, terrible, receding away into old God's time, like the walkers walking so far along Killiney Strand that, as you watch them, there is a moment when they are only a black speck, and then they're gone. Maybe old God's time longs for the time when it was only time, the stuff of the clockface and the wristwatch. But that didn't mean it could be summoned back, or should be. He had been asked to reach back into memory, as if a person could truly do that.

Quoth the raven, never would be. Here was now, a light year removed from that reverberating day, and all the things that followed, all the hard things, the happy things, the happier things. The usual fog cleared a moment from his mind. The small hours were refining him down, like a rough whiskey. What would God want to take from his story, he wondered. St bloody Peter at his gate. What was important in all this, his life, his life, like any other life? He thought suddenly of all the detectives on the earth, and all the detectives that had been on the earth – would it be hundreds of thousands? Would they be herded into the detective enclosure? And made to race against each other like horses? All the detectives – the violent crimes, the rapes, the murders, the con jobs, the robberies, the frauds, the very waterspout, the waterfall, the great flood of crimes in human stories. The hubbub, the hubbub. That had so concerned them all. Like the waterfall in Powerscourt, pouring down, pouring down. And all these men, in all the languages of the world, all the races, all the forces, trying to peer in, to weigh up, to come to conclusions, to strike it lucky, cop a break, to squeak a case through by the skin of its teeth. What was their worth, their own weight? And what was at the heart of it? His life, his little life? The fog edged away from the shore of himself, the sea opened like the stage in a theatre, the helpful sun burned in its element, there was a truth told to him, a truth, in his curious age, in his palpable decay, that there at the heart of it, there at the heart of it, for ever and always, was June. Winnie and Joseph and June. But June.

It was a story of atrocities, certainly. It was almost beyond description, and he had laboured for years not to describe it, to anyone else, and more importantly to himself. Never to allow the little sequence of horrors to play in his brain. Think everything else before he thought of those things. Think of things that did not exist, talk to the tumbleweeds of souls that did not exist. See ghosts before telling that story. Clamp his mind shut with heavy Victorian metal clamps. Now no more. It was no longer possible to be a citizen of grief, his passport to grief was cancelled, he couldn’t enter there. Now he must be brave. Of course, unbeknownst to him, he had been brave all his life. That was true, but not true for him. The main drone of the pipes he had heard under everything for sixty years and more was alarm and confusion, like the very pith of battle. Now that was not so, so much. He wondered was there God involved? Had he been released from his ordeal? He didn’t know. He could be suspicious of the brightness in him, in his limbs, in his almost ecstasy, as being something slipped into him by a medicinal god, like a needle with a vaccine in it. He didn't know. Something else knew. It might as well have phoned him on the telephone. Come in, come in, you can row that boat no more. The current was against you. Here is a little harbour. Rest up there.