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  Time would be malleable for her in her world of supposition, so the formidable oak stairway would still be intact, the steps would even creak as she mounted them. The door to her bedroom would still be open, so she could enter, silent as the grave, and observe her young self sleeping at last, under the oatmeal-coloured blanket, the doll with its Puritan bib and smock on the pillow beside her. She could watch her own chest rise and fall, her bowed mouth half open, she could bend close and feel the warmth of her breath. She could wonder at her loneliness, her utter isolation, the kind of isolation that animates the inanimate Hester, that brings others, perhaps even me, into being. She could cease these suppositions then and look once more out of the window, see below her, instead of a policeman stamping his feet, blowing his cold fingers, wondering about the fact of murder, hares dancing in the moonlit fields between the haystacks.

  12

  NINA’S MOTHER, IN the third year of the new century, came to acknowledge her imaginative world for what it was—loneliness. Perhaps because she herself was growing familiar with that condition. The days stretched out ahead of her like infinite extensions of the crossword puzzles she filled-in, drab, endless and somehow more real than she had ever expected them to be. Her husband returned home at six, then often left again at seven, to oversee the night shippings. Everything that was new to him, it seemed, was old to her, in this vast house where she had grown up, with this child whose imaginative world filled all the empty spaces. She slept late often, rose to find Nina already fed by Mary Dagge and realised her more ardent self was slumbering too. “Nine across,” she said to her husband once at dinner, “Spanish Court painter.”

  “Velázquez,” he replied, but without the recognition she had hoped for. She decided then, to let that self slumber on.

  And in the absence of Isobel Shawcross, she decided to leave her daughter’s schooling to nature, Dan Turnbull and the “two disgraces” from the cottage across the river. Nina would eventually learn to spell, with the same George and Janie, in the national school across the river, and would misspell one word consistently, leaving out the “e”: lonly. And when the mistake was pointed out to her, she would misspell it deliberately, claiming it looked more beautiful that way.

  But for the moment she was left free, to substitute real friends for imaginary ones, to share their world, to adopt the townland dialect, so fivepence became fippence, a long walk became a dreadful foreigner. She would talk of silage and rides on the back of the harvester with Dan, of colly dogs that are whores for barking, and her bemused parents would see this lithe tinker grow between them. Her father would walk her through that long cathedral of steaming ice and hear her talk with the shellfish packers in a tongue that was, to him, near impenetrable.

  Her summer became one long swathe of sensuality, a bathing suit beneath a tattered dress, whole weeks spent on the dunes that spread from the Baltray golf-course to the interminable stretch of empty beach to the north of the river-mouth. The cottages across the Boyne river from her father’s shellfish plant became her second home: George and Janie Tuite in one, fifteen children spread between the other two. The blue and white horizon of the foaming sea was always perched, it seemed, over the three smoking chimneys, threatening to douse them entirely. Between those cottages and her parents’ large, ungovernable house was the estuary swamp, a terrain of dried mud, of slowly creeping tides, of barely formed canals Dan Turnbull had chosen to call Mozambique.

  Why Mozambique, they were never sure. But there were flies in Mozambique, Dan told them, flies, mosquitoes, and the fetid humours you get in flatlands below sea-level, so Mozambique it did become. And in Mozambique there were all of the estuary delights, crabs and kingfishers, channels and runnels, stagnant ponds, mudflats and seeping tides that rose at will, turning cracked black earth into mud that squelched and oozed between George’s ever-naked toes. There were men digging for earthworms in the early morning, mists like white hair clinging to the low ground, obliterating the dunes beyond, making Mozambique seem endless, men turning sand with spades, severing a lugworm here, a ragworm there. And when the men and the mists departed, there were monsters to be found in Mozambique: a huge flatfish left in a runnel by the departing tide, flapping, gasping vainly for air with its whitened mouth; an eel slinking in a stilled pool; multitudinous crabs; and one day a horned creature, up to its midriff in the soft mud, mud caked on its hair, its tail, mud from the incessant flailing of its four trapped legs, mud which dried around it as the sun rose.

  They surveyed this thing for hours, a footless mound of hair with two curved horns rising from it, wondering was it reindeer, unicorn or seahorse, until Dan arrived and told them it was none of those, it was Mabel Hatch’s goat. He undid the muddied rope from round its neck, slid it beneath its belly, avoided its jagging horns and pulled. And they heard grotesque sucking sounds as first the front legs, then the back ones emerged from their prison in the sludge and the whole goat was up, unsteady on its feet but standing free and readying itself to take a run at Dan. Which it tried, but slipped and rolled again in the mud-caked earth, and Dan said “Enough so,” grabbed it by the horns and hind legs, hoisted it over his shoulders and walked into the sunlight towards Mabel Hatch’s field.

  And what she would remember for ever was not the goat stuck in the mud but the horns, which seemed to sprout from Dan Turnbull’s bent head as he disappeared, silhouetted against the light.

  George walked in the goat’s footsteps, his bare feet obliterating the cloven indentations in the mud. “So, it was a goat, then,” he said.

  “No,” Nina answered, “it was a unicorn.”

  “Dan Turnbull said it was Mabel Hatch’s goat.”

  “Well, Hester told me it was a unicorn. What do you think, Janie?”

  “A unicorn,” said Janie, “without a doubt.”

  “So where does a unicorn come from?” George asked. He was in a shifting, uncertain world, each question could be referred to an entity that wasn’t there.

  “From the sea,” Nina answered. “Hester thinks a unicorn comes from the sea. And in the sea it has a tail like a mermaid, or a sea-horse really, and when it reaches the land, why the tail turns into legs.”

  “Legs,” repeated George.

  “Legs, four legs. A tail for the water, legs for the land.”

  And sure enough, the cloven tracks led right to the water’s edge, where they disappeared into the inky current.

  “A unicorn feeds on starfish,” Nina said, “spears them with its horn, and that’s what the horn is for. And when the starfish run out, a unicorn has to venture on dry land.”

  “And what does it eat on dry land?” George asked.

  “Eels,” said Nina without hesitation.

  “Eels,” repeated Janie.

  “Eels and starfish, the basic unicorn diet without which its horn falls off, the coat moults and it ends up looking like any old goat.”

  “Goat,” said Georgie, “you said goat.”

  “I said like any old goat, didn’t I Janie?”

  “You did, Nina. And stop asking unicorn questions, Georgie, we’re getting tired.”

  So they ran from Mozambique to the Sahara, the Sahara being those large slopes of elephant grass which they tumbled down, dresses up to their shoulders, bloomers to the air.

  “Close your eyes, George, and count to twenty,” Janie said.

  “What if I don’t?” he replied.

  “Then the unicorn will get you—”

  So of course he shut them on the instant, placed sandy fingers over his crinkled lids and began counting. And they ran fast and kept running until he was long out of earshot, until they reached that jagged line of rocks where the river met the sea. Janie pulled off her dress and dived and Nina followed suit and they swam out to the raft by the Lady’s Finger and lay there for hours until the sun had dried their skins to a silken sheen, till they heard George roaring from the shore, an ancient bellow of agony and loss. And they turned their heads and saw a salmon fisherman comfort
ing him, though his grief seemed unstoppable. They dived back in and swam towards him, got close enough to hear the fisherman saying, there are no unicorns son, and even if there were they wouldn’t take your sister.

  “What was that, mister?” Janie said, stepping from the water like a mermaid herself, the sun glinting on every drop that clung to her thin body. “What do you know about unicorns?”

  “Where’s the poor craythur’s mother?” the fisherman asked.

  “She drowned,” said Janie, “she was swimming, when the unicorns took her.”

  Janie held out her arms for George. But the one he ran to, clung to, was Nina.

  That body, smaller than mine, a ball of muscle even then, clinging to my wet self for fear the unicorns would take me. I kissed his tears away and took his hand and said, “Georgie, porgy, pudd’n’npie, kissed the girls and made them cry. Stop it now.” But he couldn’t, great raking breaths coursing through his lungs, his arms, his hands, his lips shaking for fear of a loss he couldn’t comprehend, and when the fear was banished the tears kept coming, a delirium to be stopped only by its own exhaustion. It was the first of those moments when the world, its furies, its pains, its agonies overwhelmed him with a physical wallop. And as he grew the warp-spasms grew, until at last they lost the battle with his great hulking body and buried themselves somewhere inside it. But then he was small, tiny and afraid and I carried him, little Nina, big George, through the Sahara grasses, back over the mudflats of Mozambique to the curve of river by the swing and dipped him in. And only those waters seemed to calm him.

  From the top window of the dead governess’s room the phosphorescent sea is visible, the waves crashing with their insane regularity, the foam gleaming in the winter moonlight and the small row of cottages in the bowl of dunes beneath it. Two of them were thatched then and one, George and Janie Tuite’s, had a red oxide corrugated metal roof. We came to share each other’s homes, the anomaly of the contrast between the large limestone one and the minuscule one of pink-tinted whitewash being lost entirely on the three of us.

  Jeremiah Tuite, who worked as pilot for the Harbourmaster, who would take us on his tug as he went to help the boats cross the bar, whose blue serge waistcoat had anchor buttons on it, came to view me, his “little Nina,” as a cousin, a niece, a half-sibling of kinds, he found me so often beneath his corrugated roof. He smoked a pipe and drank porter in the Silver Dollar Bar. He swung Mrs. Eva Tuite in a ceremonious half-circle each time he came home, as if he had just navigated to safety the Flying Dutchman. He would sit wreathed in tobacco-smoke, chair tilted against his pink-washed cottage wall, scanning the horizon for incoming vessels, then begin the race to be the first to meet it. His little Nina came to love that smoke, the peaty smell of it, came to love the sound of rain drumming off their metal roof, the taste of salted herring and potato cakes, if the rains persisted and she had to stay for tea.

  And when the summer ended and school began, it seemed natural that the lacunae left in her education by the dead governess should be filled by the National School System. So she came to walk, with Janie and George, the three miles from her house to the National School on the Drogheda Road. The smell of sour milk would hit her from the yard, blending uneasily with the tang of urine from the toilets. She picked her way through the scraps of yesterday’s bread, through the scavenging seagulls, her white shoes a perfect contrast to the grime. She found herself privileged there, in the dull green room with the high windows, the sunlight crawling through them, reaching only the upper walls; Miss Cannon, with a green plaid skirt to match those walls, leaving her free to dream, presuming the large house she came from conferred some prior refinement on her.

  She was spared the strap and the ruler, the ruler which rained liberally on poor George’s palms, his knuckles, his head, his shoulders. George got to know that strip of wood intimately, its edges serrated with the indentations of inches and feet, got to know its mood, its weather, its humours, always, it seemed, malign. “Your place, George Tuite,” Miss Cannon would loudly inform him as he stuttered through his Viva Voce, “is not so much in this class as in the low field with your trousers in one hand and a lump of grass in the other.” The same field that Nina, Janie and George sat in after school, filling his copybook among the cowslips. But their neat girlish handwriting could never save him from the terror of recitation, his breath coagulating in his chest and his stutter rising gradually from staccato to the strangled lament of a dying swan. His broken syllables would stretch into one long single vowel, rising in his boy-soprano pitch to meet the whistling trill and crack of Miss Cannon’s chosen instrument. The manuscript of his hands became an object of wonder after school, how two small lumps of flesh could carry so much scrawl—weals, welts, mounds of purple, streaks of broken, bloodied skin.

  Nina would take one calloused hand, Janie the other and walk him down the lane to the low field among the haystacks. While Janie gathered cowslips, Nina would crush dockleaves and wrap them round his beaten hands and tell him Jesus Christ suffered more.

  “Will you marry me, George?” she would ask him, spreading the green juice from the dockleaf like lipstick over his trembling mouth.

  “Yes,” he would answer without hesitation, a blush like real lipstick spreading to his cheeks.

  “You heard him, Janie, he said yes.”

  “And that’s a promise,” Janie would say, placing cowslips on each of her fingers. “And if you break it, Hester will give you a whipping.”

  “Does Hester give whippings?” George would ask.

  “Yes,” said Nina, “with her blackthorn stick. None of Miss Cannon’s old rulers for Hester. In fact, here comes Hester now, she wants to be a witness.”

  “What’s a witness?”

  “The one who says I heard you say you’ll marry her and who’ll give you a whipping if you don’t. The one who says, now is the time to kiss the bride.”

  “Who’s the bride?”

  “I am, silly. And now’s the time.”

  And Nina kissed him. On his green-smeared lips, on his green-smeared, calloused hands.

  “Is that better, George?”

  And George would nod. The kiss, he wanted to say, was almost worth the beating.

  He grew attached to the after-school salving, to the kisses, to the hands that crushed the dockleaves, the fingers that placed them on his weals, the lips that brushed off each bloodied stripe, to the sight of her walking towards him from the house each morning, as he waited with Janie behind the metal gates. He would see the large door open, the mother bend down to kiss her cheek, see Nina emerge, oddly self-possessed, feet crunching delicately on the gravel, framed by the large, grey house.

  “What larks, Pip,” she would say, like her father.

  “What larks, Joe,” was his and Janie’s answer, though they knew not why.

  He walked barefoot for the first two months, September, October, then, when the November chill set in, inherited a pair of boots several sizes too big that left his sockless ankles raw. Nina found a pair of her own cast-off bootees and fitted them on his feet one morning in December, when the weals on his ankles almost matched those on his hands and the frost on the ground made walking barefoot impossible. Then he made his way over, the two miles to school in uncommon comfort, only to be surrounded in the schoolyard and pilloried mercilessly. Georgie Porgy what’s the news, comes to school in girlie shoes. Georgie lashed out with his delicate boots and his fists which proved surprisingly indelicate, felled three of his tormentors before he was frogmarched by Miss Cannon to another, more comprehensive thrashing.

  And thereafter a different George emerged, as if a chrysalis of soft skin had been shed, revealing a tougher, more impenetrable one beneath. His stutter congealed, during Viva Voce, into a monosyllabic mumble, his hands developed hide like leather and began to tire even Miss Cannon’s indefatigable arm, and he grew into a child larger than most, immune to teasing, to his peers’ contempt, still unaccountably attached to Nina’s cast-off boots.
r />   He wore them on the wran day, when they dressed him in one of Janie’s smocks and carried him in a handcart from house to house with blackened faces and an imaginary bird in a furze bush. He wore them as the winter changed to spring, as the frozen earth on the road to school turned to mud again, as May approached and the mud turned to hard earth with a coating of fine dust. When his growing toes sprouted between the leathers and the uppers he wore them still; when Janie had cast off her own shoes and walked happily barefoot again, he wore them still; he wore them till all the stitching had shredded, till the soles had flapped loose, till the laces decayed and they literally fell off his feet. And only then did he go barefoot again.

  “What larks, Pip,” Nina said, seeing the discarded bootees by the roadside.

  “What larks, Nina,” he replied.

  “You don’t say what larks Nina,” Janie told him, “you say what larks Joe.”

  “Why can’t I say what larks Nina?”

  “Don’t ask me, ask Nina.”

  “Because that’s not in the story.”

  And Nina told him the story just as her father had told it, of Pip and Joe Gargery and of the larks they had when Mrs. Joe wasn’t looking, of the blacksmith Orlick, the convict Magwitch and the beautiful Estella.

  “The beautiful Estella,” George repeated.

  “Yes,” said Nina, “in the big house behind the barred gates, with Miss Havisham and her mouldy wedding dress.”

  ~

  The books frozen in their places on the shelves: A Child’s Garden Of Verses, Cautionary Tales, The Water Babies, What Katy Did, Lorna Doom, Little Women, Jo’s Boys, Little Men, Hard Times, Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre. The mildew on their spines dampens as the winter sun creeps through the window and ices over once more at night. Each frosted title acts like a lost perfume, whole worlds released in association. Matilda told such dreadful lies, it made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes. My memories, frosted like theirs, as yet untitled. What larks, Pip. Miss Havisham, all her clocks stopped. Now that time has stopped do I remember, no, I read, as if within those frozen spines, the book whose ending I didn’t write, written for me by one who hardly learned to write. I give it chapter headings, turn the non-existent pages, inhabit the story, delight in it, weep in it, die in it. But can I change the conclusion? Not a whit. The end began it and beginning ended it.