Ghostwritten Read online

  ‘—deflowering maidens,’ butted in John through a mouthful of sausage. ‘According to Dennis.’

  ‘It’s not fair, Ma,’ Liam turned red as a beetroot. ‘He speaks to Professor Dannan once a week.’

  ‘As I have done for the last twenty years. Why should I stop just because he’s your tutor?’

  Liam harrumphed, and walked over to the window. ‘It looks like the end of the world out there.’

  Schroedinger came in through the cat flap, and looked around hypercritically.

  ‘What, cat?’ asked Liam.

  Schroedinger chose John’s lap in which to exact tribute.

  The storm battered the island.

  ‘I’m a shade concerned about our Kiwi visitor.’ John picked up the telephone. ‘Mrs Dunwallis? This is John. I’m just phoning to check whether or not your Kiwi visitor got back to the hostel safe and sound . . . she called in here earlier, asking for directions to the stone row, with the gales, I was worried . . . Are you sure? Of course you’re sure . . . No idea. Mrs Cuchthalain’s at Roe Bridge? Sure . . . will do.’

  ‘What’s up, Da?’

  ‘No New Zealanders at the Youth Hostel.’

  ‘She must have just been a day tripper, then.’

  ‘Billy wouldn’t risk taking St Fachtna over to Baltimore in this weather.’

  ‘She’s still on the island then. She must have taken shelter in the village.’

  ‘Aye. There’s a logical explanation.’

  I felt hollow. I was afraid there was a very logical explanation.

  John and I were in our firelit bedroom. Liam was in the bath having a long soak, after e-mailing a girl in Dublin whose name we couldn’t tease out of him. John massaged my feet as thunder galloped by. I watched the sphinxes and the faces and flowers in the bedroom’s fireplace. The physics and chemistry of fire only add to its poetry. This way of living was so normal to Clear Islanders. Mo, why are evenings like this so rare for you?

  I am the ancient mariner: that black book is my albatross.

  ‘What am I going to do, John? When they get here?’

  ‘Mo, let’s cross that one when we get to it.’

  ‘I don’t even know if I should cross it at all.’

  On the third day I knew where I was before I opened my eyes. The black book was safe. Yesterday’s storms were long gone, the early sunlight lit the curtains, ending its twenty-six-minute journey on the jiggleable electrons in my retina. The wind was brisk, the sky was bright and cloud shadows slid over Roaringwater Sound and the three Calf Islands. Planck was barking. Thousands of Arab children were gambolling into the sea, steam hissing off their burns. A noise on the stairs made me turn around. The Texan filled the doorframe. He clicked the safety catch off and aimed the gun at the black book, then at me. ‘We need Quancog to rise again, Dr Muntervary.’ He winked at me as he pulled the trigger.

  I lay there for twenty minutes, calming down. The early sunlight lit the curtains.

  John’s eyeballs rolled under his eyelids, seeing something I couldn’t.

  Our very first morning together in this house, this room, this bed, was our first morning as husband and wife. Twenty years ago! Brendan had constructed the bed, and Maisie had painted the Michaelmas daisies along the headboard. The bedding was from Mrs Dunwallis, who’d stuffed the pillows from her own geese. Aodhagan Croft itself was a wedding present from John’s Aunt Cath, who had gone to live with Aunt Triona in Baltimore. No electricity, no telephone, no sewage tank. My own parents’ house in the sycamore trees was still standing, but the floorboards and rafters had rotted right through, and we didn’t have the money to reverse dereliction.

  Besides Aodhagan we had John’s harp, my doctorate, a crate of books that had been my da’s library, and a cartload of tiles and whitewash lugged up from the harbour by Freddy Doig’s horse. My job at Cork University didn’t begin until the autumn term. I’ve never felt such freedom since, and I know I never will again.

  Down in the kitchen the telephone rang. Leave me alone, leave me alone.

  To my surprise Liam was already up and had answered it before the third ring. ‘Oh, hi, Aunt Maisie . . . Yeah, they’re still in bed, on a morning like this, can you believe it? Bone idle or what? Uni’s fine . . . Which one? Nah, she’s history, I knocked that one on the head weeks ago . . . Not literally, no. Right, I’ll tell ’em when they drag themselves down. Okay.’

  I left John asleep. I hobbled downstairs, the stairs and my ankles creaking. ‘Morning, First-Born.’

  ‘Only-Born. That was Aunt Maisie. She told me to say “Kilmagoon” to you. She’s cleaning the pipes in the bar, but will be going to Minnaunboy to cut Sylvester’s hair later. Nicky O’Driscoll’s privy got blown away in the gale, and Maire Doig caught a monster conger eel. She’s suffering from gossip deprivation. Sleep okay?’

  ‘Like a log.’

  A pause while Liam worked up to something.

  ‘Ma – are you going to tell everyone about the Americans?’

  ‘I think it’s best not to.’

  ‘When are they going to come?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Sooner or later?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Then when are we going to hide out somewhere?’

  ‘You’re going back to university, my boy.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘As you astutely observed, I’m not James Bond. I can’t go on hiding. The only places I would be safe from the Americans are places more dangerous than Saragosa. All I can do is wait for them to come.’

  Liam spooned up some milk and dribbled it down into his bowl.

  ‘They can’t just abduct an Irish citizen! And you’re not exactly nobody, either. It would be an international incident. The media would kick up too much fuss.’

  ‘Liam, they are the most powerful people on the planet and they want what is in my head and my black book. Neither international law nor BBC Radio would come into it.’

  Liam’s forehead knotted up, like it used to before a tantrum. ‘But . . . how are we supposed to live like this? Do we just sit around waiting for you to be got?’

  ‘I wish I had an answer for you, love.’

  ‘It’s not fair!’

  ‘No.’

  The legs of his chair scraped as he stood up. ‘Well, damn it all, Ma!’

  I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I’m going to go and feed the chickens.’ He put his duffle coat over his pyjamas and went out.

  I put the kettle on, and waited for it to whistle.

  The grandfather clock’s pendulum grated like a spade digging far below.

  Eighteen years ago I was flat on my back in the bedroom, with Liam tunnelling out of my womb. A windtunnel of agony! I didn’t want to give birth on Clear Island – I was a research lecturer acquainted with the latest medical technology. That very day I was leaving for Cork to stay with Bella and Alain near a shiny hospital with a cheerful midwife from Jamaica, but Liam had other ideas. Even today he’s patient only until he’s bored. So instead of my gleaming ward I had Aodhagan’s bedroom, my mother, Maisie, an icon of St Bernadette, some anti-faerie herbs, towels and steaming kettles. John was smoking downstairs with Brendan, and Father Wally was on hand with his holy water.

  When he was out, as I lay there unstitched, the pain seeping away, Maisie held up Liam! This alien parasite, glistening in mucus? Laugh or cry? Birth had come visiting, just as death will, and everything was perfectly clear. My mother, Maisie, St Bernadette and I shared a few moments, postponing the clodhopping hullabaloo. Maise washed Liam in a tin bath.

  It was noon. I felt I was cradling little Apollo.

  Liam fed the hook into the mouth of the earthworm. The hook slid deeper into its gut as it squirmed. ‘Chew on that, my hermaphrodite.’

  ‘How can you do that and not bring your breakfast up?’

  The sea breathed deeply in, and deeply out.

  ‘Ah well, Mam. Life’s a bitch, then you die.’

  He got up
and cast off. I lost sight of the float until the plop sounded. My eyesight is definitely getting worse.

  Seals were basking between the rock pools. The bull hauled himself into the sea, and sank from sight for thirty seconds. Thirty yards out his head appeared, reminding me of Planck.

  ‘You must have fished with live bait when you were a girl, Ma?’

  ‘I usually had my head in books. Your grandmother was the real fisherman of the family. She’d be out before dawn on mornings like these. I must have told you a dozen times.’

  ‘You never have. What about Grandpa?’

  ‘His pleasure lay in weaving extraordinary lies.’

  ‘What like?’

  ‘One time he said King Cuchulainn had given Bonnie Prince Charlie all his gold to look after before he went mad and turned into a newt. Bonnie Prince Charlie, running from Napoleon Bonaparte, hid the gold under a stone on Clear Island, and if we looked hard enough we’d be sure to find it. We spent a whole summer, me and the Docherty twins. Then Roland Davitt pointed out the chronological inconsistencies.’

  ‘What did you say to Grandpa?’

  ‘I asked him why he’d lied.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He told me that no scientist based her research on secondhand data without checking its veracity beforehand, using the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the village school.’

  A motor boat crossed the sound. I looked through the binoculars.

  ‘It’s okay, Ma. It’s only Daibhi O’Bruadair raising his lobster pots.’

  Mo, don’t be so jumpy! God knows when you’ll next have a free morning with Liam. Could be tomorrow, could be years from now.

  For a little while we said nothing, Liam standing there fishing, and me lying on the warm rock. I listened to the waves breathe through the shingle.

  The rain was falling onto the roofs of Skibbereen, coming out of the guttering in great gurgling arcs and slapping onto the pavements. The nursing home attendant poured one cup of tea in the china teacup. It had a wide brim to hasten thermal equilibrium and a mousepaw-sized handle to hasten spillage. ‘I’m sorry the head matron couldn’t be here to see you herself, Dr Muntervary . . . but visitors usually let us know in advance that they’ll be paying a call.’

  ‘It’s just a flying visit.’

  The nurse and I caught each other searching the other’s face and we both looked down. I could imagine the Texan speaking to her: ‘I’m an old friend of Mo and John . . . if Mo shows up, give me a bell. I’d love to surprise her.’

  We looked at my ma.

  ‘Mrs Muntervary? Your daughter’s come.’ I suspected the softness in the attendant’s voice only appeared when visitors came to tea.

  I looked around the room. ‘Very nice in here . . .’ What rubbish.

  ‘Yes,’ said the attendant. ‘We do our best.’ More rubbish. ‘Well, I’ll leave you for a little while. I have to supervise the crochet class, to make sure there are no upsets with the needles.’

  Everything in the room was magnolia. Anonymity is grey, forgetting is magnolia.

  I looked at my mother. Lucy Eileen Muntervary. Are you somewhere, looking at us both but unable to signal, or are you nowhere now? When I visited at the end of winter you had been upset. You remembered my face but not who it belonged to.

  Wigner maintains that human consciousness collapses one lucky universe into being from all of the possible ones. Had my mother’s universe now uncollapsed? Were cards flying back across the baize back into the dealer’s pack?

  My mother blinked.

  ‘Ma . . .’ A voice used to address a saint believed in only when needed.

  ‘Ma, if you can hear me . . .’ Now I’m opening a seance.

  Why are you putting yourself through this, Mo?

  Without where I am from and who I am from, I am nothing, even if the glass is gone and conifers are growing through where the roof should be. All those wideworlders in transit, all those misplaced, thrown-away people who know as little as they care about their roots – how do they do it? How do they know who they are?

  My ma blinked.

  ‘Ma, do you remember dancing with Da in the parlour?’

  I persuaded myself that she was enjoying the patter of raindrops on the windowsill. We watched the waterflower-fireworks until the attendant returned.

  Over Lios O Moine comes Father Wally, freewheeling on his tricycle, his habit flapping behind him in the wind. I watch him getting nearer and larger, and find myself calculating a parallax matrix. We wave. Liam is still concentrating, swishing his fishing line from time to time. I can hear Father Wally’s tricycle now, a rusty brigand on coasters. He dismounts cowboy-style, standing on one pedal and jumping as it cruises to a crash. His face is red from the exercise and the wind, his hair fine and white from age.

  ‘Morning to the pair o’ye! You survived the gales, then. Your eye’s looking better, Mo. I called into Aodhagan to see about saving my bishop. He told me you’d be here. It’s a fair old spot to see dolphins. Fish biting, Liam?’

  ‘Not yet, Father. They’ve probably just had breakfast.’

  ‘Shufty up on our blanket, Father. I’ve got a thermos of tea and a thermos of coffee.’

  ‘I’ll go with your tea, there, Mo. Coffee is fine for the body, but tea is the drink of the soul.’

  ‘I read a few weeks back,’ said Liam, ‘that tea was first processed accidentally in the holds of long-distance clippers from India. It took so long, and got so hot, that the crates of green tea started to ferment. And when they opened the crates at Bristol or Dublin or Le Havre, the stuff we call tea is what they found. But it was all a mistake, to begin with.’

  ‘I wasn’t knowing that,’ said Father Wally, ‘so many things there are to know. Most things happen because of mistakes.’

  ‘Can I leave you with Ma, Father Wally? I want to cast off further down. I think the seals might be scaring the fishing off.’

  ‘Even Jesus tended to put fishing first.’

  After the upstairs raid, I knew I had to leave right then. Huw tried to dissuade me, and talked about coincidences and overreacting, but there was no way I’d risk bringing those people into his life, and he knew I was right. We spoke in whispers as I packed. I judged it too dangerous to try to leave Hong Kong by the airport. Huw walked me to a big hotel near his office. I said goodbye to my only friend east of Lake Geneva. I checked in with my real name, and then took a taxi to another hotel, where I checked in with my fake passport.

  The following day I lay low. From the travel office in the hotel I obtained a visa for China and a train ticket with my own compartment to Beijing. When I was a girl, I dreamed of such journeys. Now I could only dream of its end.

  Tomorrow, mainland Asia would swallow me whole.

  Father Wally and I sat nursing our cups of tea, watching Liam fish in front of creation. Mount Gabriel rose on the peninsula to the blue north.

  ‘Fine lad,’ said Father Wally. ‘Your da and ma would be proud of him.’

  ‘Do you know Father, in the last seventeen years, I’ve spent only five years and nine months with Liam? That’s only twenty-six per cent. Am I crazy? It’s like John and I have been divorced. I didn’t mean it to be like that. I sometimes worry I’ve deprived him of his roots.’

  ‘Does he look like a victim of deprivation to you?’

  All six feet of Liam, because of John and me.

  St Fachtna crossed the water towards Baltimore. I tried not to see it. ‘Have a digestive biscuit, Father.’

  ‘Don’t mind if I do, thanking you. Remember the day Liam was born?’

  ‘I was thinking about it this morning, funnily enough.’

  ‘I’ve christened some ugly babies in my time, Mo, but . . .’

  I laughed. ‘I wish John could see him now.’

  ‘John sees better than most. He’s a hell-bound atheist and slippery as an eel when it comes to the Russian Bishop’s Switchblade, but he’s got the patience of Job.’

  ‘He’s got a better c
hoice in friends than Job.’

  ‘Folks with most to complain about seldom complain most.’

  ‘John says, self-pity’s the first step to despair for blind people.’

  ‘Aye, I can see that, but none the less . . .’

  Father Wally wanted to say something else, so I waited and watched a flotilla of puffins. Across the bay, in the harbour, sheets were drying in the wind. I found myself calculating how long one Homer Missile with a Quancog module would take to decide where the optimum point of impact would be – thirty nanoseconds. Inside eight seconds the hillside would be a fireball.

  ‘Mo,’ began Father Wally, making a tent with his hands. ‘John’s told me nothing. But that tells me a lot. Then there’s the chain of people passing on tapes to John and back all year, you know how people jump to conclusions—’

  ‘I can’t tell you, Father. I want to, but I can’t. I can’t even tell you why I can’t.’

  ‘Mo, I’m not asking you to discuss any of that secret hoipolloy. I just wanted to say that you’re one of us, and we stick by our own.’

  Before I could answer mechanical thunder scattered the sheep and ripped the air. We watched the fighter plane fly off to the north. Liam waded back towards us.

  ‘Infernal things!’ growled Father Wally. ‘There’s been a spate of them recently. They’ve reopened the old army range over on Bear Island. Now we’re a Gaelic tiger we’re getting airs about power. Won’t we ever learn? Ireland, and power. Fine by themselves, but bring them together and it all goes wrong, like, like . . .’

  ‘Kiwi fruit and yoghurt,’ said Liam. ‘Bitter.’

  ‘We’ll be wanting our own satellites next, and nuclear bombs.’

  ‘Ireland pays into the European Space Agency already, doesn’t it Ma?’

  ‘There you go,’ said Father Wally. ‘We’re one of the last corners of Europe, and Clear Island is the last corner of Ireland, but it’s catching up with us, even here.’

  Electrons in my brain are moving forwards and backwards in time, changing atoms, changing electrical charge, changing molecules, changing chemicals, carrying impulses, changing thoughts, deciding to have a baby, changing ideas, deciding to leave Light Box, changing theory, changing technology, changing computer circuitry, changing artificial intelligence, changing the projections of missiles whole segments of the globe away, and collapsing buildings onto people who have never heard of Ireland.