Shade Read online

  “A lyrical experiment in point-of-view . . . It’s not surprising that Jordan, writer and director of The Crying Game and Michael Collins^ would have a lot to say about identity and sexuality, acting and observing, and politics. But as this quiet novel steps surely toward its powerful conclusion, it’s also a testament to the simple but profound power of storytelling.”—Booklist

  “Lyrically precise writing . . . The specific detail with which Nina describes her early years . . . and her experience of the movies’ transition from silent films to ‘talkies’ is invariably dramatic and interesting.”—Kirkus Reviews

  “With this fierce, dark and yet luminous novel, Neil Jordan once again demonstrates that he is one of Ireland’s most talented artists.”—John Banville

  “Compelling, intriguing, precise and poetic, personal and political, at once a human drama and a fascinating metaphysical mystery, Shade courses its way, like the river Boyne that runs through it, steadily, patiently but, thankfully, never predictably—we should expect nothing less from the author of The Crying Game—before reaching its final, heartbreaking denouement. Triumphant. ‘’—Patrick McCabe

  “The extraordinary Shade . . . restores Jordan to his Irish roots and, more particularly, to the intricate emotional landscapes of his early work . . . Jordan’s rich, visual prose is perfectly cadenced to this tragedy of misplaced love. Few writers can convey human loneliness in quite such an achingly spare, unsentimental form.’’—Independent

  “{Jordan] recreates the drained landscape with the vivid care of a Dutch painting, and infuses it with longing . . . Wonderfully elegiac . . . The book is powerfully visual.”—Guardian

  Praise for Shade

  ‘Jordan’s lavish, meticulous portrayals of the brackish waters in Ireland, the crackle of shells in the riverbed underfoot, the bobbing heads of the dead in battle, help weave fiction and history seamlessly together . . . Jordan’s writing . . . easily communicates the nuances that shape the friends’ relationships, as well as the enthralling story that drives the reader to find out exactly why Nina was murdered.”—San Francisco Chronicle

  “The ways in which the children’s maturing love for each other plays out are unpredictable—sometimes staggering—and the final revelations . . . will bring a gasp of shock or admiration from even the most worldly reader.”—Los Angeles Times

  “Jordan, who loves tricks and surprise endings, rises to his own challenge of keeping us in suspense even though we already know how the story is going to end.”—New York Times Book Review

  “A feverish gothic tale . . . graceful . . . and deeply haunting.”—Bookforum

  “Jordan has endowed his shade with a rhythmically mesmerizing voice—eerie, yet deeply compassionate . . . Jordan’s evocation of childhood and youth in early 20th-century Ireland is wondrous to behold. His battle scenes are harrowing. The music of his prose is lush but not overwrought, attuned to nuances of emotion and landscape.”—Newsday

  “A haunting, compelling tale of friendship and loss . . . The layers of past and present are peeled away, tantalizing us with an ever-widening picture.”

  —St. Paul Pioneer Press

  “{An} astounding novel that captures the exquisite pleasure and pain of childhood friendships.”—East Bay Express

  “Elegantly sober narration from beyond the grave distinguishes this ghost story from novelist and Oscar-winning filmmaker Jordan . . . Daring and well-crafted.”—Publishers Weekly

  SHADE

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Night in Tunisia

  The Past

  The Dream of a Beast

  The Crying Game (screenplay)

  Sunrise with Sea Monster

  SHADE

  A NOVEL

  NEIL JORDAN

  BLOOMSBURY

  Copyright © 2004 by Neil Jordan

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced

  in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the

  publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical

  articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Publishing,

  175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, New York and London

  Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

  All papers used by Bloomsbury Publishing are natural, recyclable products made

  from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform

  to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Jordan, Neil, 1951-

  Shade : a novel / Neil Jordan

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-59691-820-7

  1. Funeral rites and ceremonies—Fiction. 2. Murder victims’ families—Fiction.

  3. Murder victims—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Ireland—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6060.O6255S53 2004

  823’.914—dc22

  2004009157

  First published in the United States by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2004

  This paperback edition published in 2005

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

  Dear shadows, now you know it all

  W. B. Yeats

  Table of Contents

  I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  II

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  III

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  IV

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  V

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Acknowledgments

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  I

  1

  I KNOW EXACTLY WHEN I died. It was twenty past three on the fourteenth of January of the year nineteen fifty, an afternoon of bright unseasonable sunlight with a whipping wind that scurried the white clouds through the blue sky above me and gave the Irish sea beyond more than its normal share of white horses.

  Even the river had its complement of white. It was a rare wind, I knew from my childhood by that river, that would mould the waves into runnels of white foam, but it was a rare wind that day. I had studied those black waters as a child, sat on the bank of its smaller tributary with the hem of my yellow skirt between my chin and knees, because waves and all of their motions held a strange fascination for me. From the inkily silver reflecting surface, untouched by air, to the parabolas of ripples that would appear and then vanish, to the regular lapping of small pyramids of water, to the sculpted cres
ts with their flecks of white. It was those the river had that day, and more. A good force five, a sailor would say. And George, who killed me, had been a sailor in his time.

  George killed me with his gardening shears, the ones with which he cut the overgrown ivy on the house and trimmed the expanse of lawn, hedge and garden that descended towards the mudflats and tributaries of the Boyne river. He had large hands, gardener’s hands, scarred in many places by the blades he wielded: shears, secateurs, lawnmower and scythe. He had one finger missing and a face marked with the memory of fires long ago. If one could have chosen one’s killer, needless to say one would not have chosen George. One would have chosen softer hands, or more efficient ones, the kind of hands that you see in films or read about in books. Definitely five-fingered hands, that could smother easily, break a neck in one gesture. But life, as we all know, rarely imitates fiction, nor does it move with the strange efficiency of the films I once acted in. And if George’s life had prepared him for anything, it was to deliver me a death that was, like the house, Georgian.

  He held the shears to my neck in the glasshouse, and with quite spectacular clumsiness opened a moonlike gash on my throat. He mistook my loss of consciousness for death, then brought the world back to me while he dragged me through the roses, the world with its scudding clouds above. He watched the last of my blood flow into the muddy channel and augmented it with tears of his own. He decided against a watery grave and carried me like a lifesize doll to the septic tank, then realised I was still living while lowering me in. He spent one last energetic minute severing the head from the body he had known, in one way or another, since his early childhood. And so my last sight was not of sky, sea or river, but of his blood-spattered watch on his thick wrist, and the time on that watch read twenty past three.

  Time ended for me then, but nothing else did. I can’t explain that fact, merely marvel at the narrative that unravels, the most impossible and yet the commonest in the books I read in that house as a child. The narrator for whom past, present and to some extent the future are the same, who flips between them with inhuman ease. My Pip is my Estella and both are my Joe Gargery, and what Joe says to Pip I would say to George. What larks, Pip.

  So there I am, aged seven, rocking on the wooden swing beneath the chestnut tree at the bottom of the sloping field that curved below the grass-covered manhole. There are Gregory and George, behind me or beneath me. I’m worried about whether they can see my knickers, then oddly not worried at all, staring at the tall, sad woman who is staring back at me, dressed in a grey fur coat, black beret and a pair of Wellington boots. This woman is me, and they are my gardening clothes. I have an attitude of elegance, despite the tufted coat, I am smiling, despite the air of angular sadness, and I am my own ghost. I am glad I didn’t know that then, glad the girl that I was could luxuriate in this comforting presence, this familiar, without knowing how familiar it actually was.

  But I knew, when he finally deposited my remains in that septic sphere, replacing the covering of rusted metal, smoothing the grass above it with his bloodied nine fingers. I knew it all then.

  You saw me play Rosalind in the school hall, George, I would have said if I could. But of course I couldn’t and his name twisted into anagrams in whatever consciousness I had. George, Eorgeg, Egg Roe, Ogre, Gregory. Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love. But men have killed for love, endlessly.

  And when he dumped me into my excremental grave it was perhaps in the dim hope that the body he’d longed for would seep one day where all the old effluent seeped, into the river and thence to the sea. And maybe it was an act of flawed, bruised affection, that attempt to send me into the mouth of the river I had loved, and into the final embrace of that sea, which had seemed to all of us, since childhood, infinite.

  To have carried me into that sea, to have lowered me into the scarfed waters of that river, might have been love, a love at least that Rosalind could have mused upon. But corpses don’t seep like effluent. George, in fact, left me undiscovered in that undiscovered country, never to reach that sea or glimpse that shore beyond which is no other shore. He would be arrested, since the trail of blood and tissue would be as messy as it could have been. But forensics wouldn’t exhume my body, he had seen to that. The plot beside my parents’ grave in Baltray churchyard would remain unopened. And I would remain in a circle of old effluent within the sphere of a septic tank.

  I look at myself, with eyes as preternaturally quiet as the eyes with which George looked at me that afternoon of scudding clouds, wind and murder. I could fear for myself, but fear will be singularly useless.. The girl that I was will follow her course and nothing I, her familiar, could do would prevent it. But there’s a comfort in her gaze and I’m trying to comprehend it. She is swinging, still, over the runnel of the larger river on that swing her father so carefully built her, swinging high, so she can see beyond the waters, beyond the dull green swathe of mud she will one day call Mozambique to where the white caps garnish the sea itself. I turn, to follow her arcing gaze towards the shore beyond which is no other shore, and her face comes level with the back of my head, and I feel the wind of life brush my dead hair into movement and I turn again and find myself looking directly into those wonderful eyes.

  I can see myself in those eyes, my own reflection, retreating from me as she swings away, gaining on me as she swings back, and I realise the comfort lies in the fact that I am seen, I am seen and therefore am. I know it with a certainty I only came close to when he hacked the head from my body and was certain that death was coming, sweet easeful death, and the certainty is that I am, I exist, somehow, in those pools of luscious brown, swinging towards me and away, on the swing Dan Turnbull and her father built her, or was it me.

  So her narrative begins, as it will end, with a ghost.

  2

  SHE HAD BEEN born in the house some time before the new century, three years exactly, but her awareness of the sad presence coincided with the new era. Three years old, in or around the year nineteen hundred, and her mother found her in the curve below the large stairwell, talking quietly and intimately to somebody who wasn’t there. The sunlight came through the bubbled glass of the tall convex window, and she sat below it in the darkness, her doll clutched to her tiny chest, talking to nothing in particular.

  “Nina Hardy,” said her mother—for that was her name, Nina, and Elizabeth was the mother’s—“whatever are you doing, talking to yourself on the draughty stairs? Come down and have your breakfast.”

  “Can she come too?” asked Nina, and when her mother asked who, Nina pointed to the nothing in particular she had been addressing.

  “Of course she can,” said mother, who was a woman wise enough not to question the private world of children, and took Nina’s hand and led her down the stairs to the stone floor of the kitchen, where the flags were cold beneath her bare feet, where the whitewashed limestone arched above the deal table and the range where Mary Dagge prepared her eggs. “Now Nina,” said Mary Dagge, “here’s your egges.”

  She pronounced eggs with two syllables because she came from the town nearby, Drogheda, where eggs were pronounced “egges.” And when she placed the cracked plate with its blue castellated pattern and its damp yellow pile of scrambled eggs beside Nina, Nina divided it neatly in two, one for herself and one for her unseen playmate. And over the years to come Mary Dagge would grow accustomed to this division of spoils, to the portions of meals left uneaten on the right-hand side of her plate, to the sugar-coated sweets carefully shared with nobody in particular and to the conversations with shadows in isolated corners of the draughty house. For Nina was an imaginative child, her large brown eyes were pools into which one could sink, gladly, and the house was large, too large for an only child like her.

  The house was on a bend of the estuary of the river Boyne, close to where it entered the sea in a small delta of mudflats. There were unkempt gardens leading to the river’s tributary, over which a chestnut tree i
nclined, and her father attached two ropes to its sturdiest overhanging branch which he tied in turn to a small wooden swing. So Nina could swing, when the weather permitted, over the coal-black waters and glimpse the white caps of the waves on the ocean beyond, providing, that is, she swung high enough. There was a glasshouse to one side and a vegetable garden, the walls of which continued, along the roadside, to the banks of the river itself.

  To be present at the beginning of a new century pleased her father, she could tell that instinctively, though she might not have known what the word century meant. But when she saw him supervise the riveting of the rope to the wooden chair of the swing, the rope spliced neatly round the piece of metal shaped like a tear-drop, the screw’s thread beneath it fitting neatly into the precut hole in the wood, she knew it was part of a process that was exact and industrial, it was to do with metal and measurement and that this swing would be a superior swing to those built long ago. And when her father lifted her at last, placed her on the finished swing, and Dan Turnbull, who had screwed the final bolts, pushed her from behind, it felt odd to be swinging on a seat so new and to be staring over the water, at the face of the sad and lovely presence who was part of a story she would never know, that must have happened long ago.

  Her father was old too, but so much in love with newness that his oldness fitted in, somehow, with every new thing. She could never imagine loving anyone more than her father, except perhaps her secret friend, during her more secret moments, but because she was secret that didn’t count. No, her father was part of the world that declared itself as real and she loved him for it, as much as for his love of all things new.

  And when he brought her to the shellfish factory he had built by the mouth of the Boyne river, on a late summer’s day when the salmon were already leaping, to show her the new ice-machine, she loved him most of all. He led her by the hand into the low, stinking interior, pierced by the rays of the summer sun from the windows on one side, where the shellfish workers stood and touched their caps as he passed towards the sound of rhythmic clunking in the back. There were clouds like steam, but it was a cold steam, and the clunking had two causes, that of the engine-belt which rattled as it moved, and that of the great ice-blocks which hit the wooden base with a thump, shattered in clouds of that cold steam and shattered again under the force of the sledgehammers which the shirtless men swung down. When he told her it would keep the shellfish alive and fresh until they reached the cities of England, it was impossible not to share his pleasure, though she was uncertain what this meant.