Torn Water

JOHN LYNCH

Torn Water

Chapter 1 - The Quarry

Chapter 2 - Sully

Chapter 3 - Teezy

Chapter 4 - Outer Space

Chapter 5 - The Rehearsal

Chapter 6 - The Bomb

Chapter 7 - The Fight

Chapter 8 - Plug and the Big ’Ammer

Chapter 9 - Al Pacino

Chapter 10 - The Grand Inquisitor

Chapter 11 - The Fury of His Other Face

Chapter 12 - Marion and the Aftermath

Chapter 13 - The Invitation

Chapter 14 - The Party

Chapter 15 - Kerry and the Fox

Chapter 16 - The Post-mortem

Chapter 17 - Logs

Chapter 18 - Amends

Chapter 19 - D-Day

Chapter 20 - The Performance

Chapter 21 - The Reward

Chapter 22 - Her Name

Chapter 23 - The Captain

Chapter 24 - The Last Night

Chapter 25 - The Checkpoint

Chapter 26 - The Man of Light

Chapter 27 - God Has a Flan for Us All

Chapter 28 - South

Chapter 29 - Dublin

Chapter 30 - Torn Water

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

To Mary

He remembers when he was very young standing by water, his whole being fastened to his reflection, which rose from the depths of the pond to sit shimmering on its dark surface. It seemed as if he was peering into his soul, into the dark matter of its substance, and felt a holy hush seize his heart as if, suddenly, the unseen channels of the world ran through his body.

How he had got there or where the pond was he couldn't remember, but he can vaguely recall a hand on his and being led through high rooms, to a large garden, where bees wove dozy patterns in the air. At the bottom of this garden lay the pond, and he remembers a face bending to meet his and whispering that they would be back in a little while. So he stood where he had been left, his small feet pointing at the stonework of the pond's rim. He remembers a wind brewing in the tops of the trees and tearing at the water for a moment before subsiding, his face then coming into focus like a TV channel being tuned.

He remembers believing he felt his soul flee his body to slip into the other him that now sat on the surface of the water. He felt it rise from the wrappings of his skin like a silhouette or the moving negative of a bird in flight, and squirm through the sharp reflection of his other self, beating a glow of joy on the dark water.

How long he was there he can't recall but those moments where he stood threaded to his other self, confused as to which was which, sit like suspended portraits at the very back of his memory. He often wonders if he has left his soul in the bottom of that pond, and that it has lain in the murky waters for years like a scarred jewel, covered in moss and the sediment of decaying fish.

1. The Quarry

Death was his friend. Mr Death dwelt in the spaces between his thoughts. It held his father in its wide blank palm. He had died when James was only eight, nine years before. One day he was there and the next he wasn't, and in his place stood Death with the endless come-on of its smile. As he had grown up James began to understand that Death was the fall at the end of his dreams. He is small and skinny for his age, like a house plant that has been stowed in the darkness of a kitchen cupboard, its pale stems reaching for light that isn't there. His eyes are blue, like the brilliant stab of a winter's sky, and they drink of the world in long distrustful slurps. His skin is freckled and his nose crooked and long. He finds it hard to sit still, and even harder to listen: since his father died, he has always felt poised on the edge of some great event, some momentous occurrence, and that he must be ready at all times, ready for the truth of it all.

He lives with his mother on a housing estate just outside Newry, surrounded by the border and its many secret crossings and pathways. His mother is small like him. She drinks. He believes it is his fault that she does. He believes that he disappoints her. He is supposed to be at school today, but they can keep it. They can keep the brooding silence of their study periods. They can keep their troops of well-heeled boys. He is different. He has always been different, he is a collector of deaths, and he stores them in the cool harbour behind his eyes, calling on them when his father's absence jags the running of his heart. He performs his deaths for anyone who will watch, or sometimes only for his own pleasure, for the closeness he feels to the lost memory of his father.

He walks down Hill Street past the shopkeepers leaning in their doorways, some tugging on cigarettes, their eyes scouring the streets, giving every face that passes them the once-over. He rounds the corner at the bottom and cuts through the deserted market, the steel frames of the stalls standing eerily on the rough concrete. He crosses Chapel Street scarcely looking at the muddle of bric-à-bric that fronts the second-hand shops. He enters the alleyway connecting Chapel Street to Fair Street, a short dark cobbled passage damp with lichen and urine. Beer cans stud the ground, some faded pale by the sun; he wrinkles his nose as the smell of old piss hits him. He reaches the roundabout at the bottom of the Dublin road and begins to walk the long, high hill towards the border.

A quarter of a mile from the Customs post a police Land Rover sits in a lay-by; he can glimpse slices of the driver's face through its wire-meshed windows. He wonders what it must be like for the men in the vehicle to live their lives wearing a rhino hide for protection, gated from life.

Two hundred yards from the Customs post he sees the roadside café, a small caravan converted to house two griddles and a host of kettles billowing large pillows of steam. A hatch juts out, creaked back on its hinges, and off into the distance articulated lorries line the road like huge boxed caterpillars.

Drivers stand below the awning above the opened hatch, their breakfast baps and steaming coffee fitted in between bouts of talk. James stands quietly at the back. He often comes here to hover on the outskirts of these men. He envies them their lofty cabs, their autonomy, their careless smiles and the pointed fingers of their speech. He has often dreamed at night of sailing across the tarmac of foreign towns and cities, high above the clamour of normal traffic, his all-seeing headlights blistering the upcoming road.

Two women flit back and forth along the hatch of the caravan, their hands glistening with grease as they stuff gaping bread rolls with sausage and bacon, and thrust them into waiting hands, wiping their fingers hurriedly on their aprons before they claim the money. James edges his way to the hatch and quietly asks for a coffee. The skinnier of the two women, black, heavily dyed hair peeping from beneath the edges of her cap, looks at him for a moment. ‘You're a funny-looking lorry driver …’

He holds his coins out quickly.

‘Shouldn't you be at school?’

‘No.’ He says it quietly, in a flat tone, trying to keep a lid on the exchange.

‘Milk?’

‘No … thanks.’

‘Sugar?’

He nods.

‘How many?’

‘Two.’

He takes his coffee, guides it down from the hatch, bending his head to meet it, and sips before he begins to move off. A main slaps his mug down and asks for a refill of tea. He looks at James, as if he is sizing up livestock in a pen. ‘Whereabouts are you from, son?’

‘Carrickburren.’

‘Carrickburren no less … Do you know a fella by the name of O'Brien lives up that way?’

‘No … Yes.’

‘Keeps the dogs … Francie O'Brien. He's some fucking horse. What's the name?’

‘Mine?’

‘Who the fuck else's? The Pope's? Yes, yours.’

‘James … James La very.’

‘Conn Lavery's son?’

‘Yeah.’

‘He was a good man, your old fella … The fucking best … A true Irishman lived and died.’

James gives his shoulders a shrug. The larger woman in the hatch hands the lorry driver his refill of tea, and as she does so James sidles off to sit on one of the bollards that dot the road. He watches as the man takes his tea and clears his throat with a large hawked spit; he hears the elastic band slap as it hits the tarmac.

‘Good to meet you, son.’

He often gets that. The nodded reverence once men find out who his father was. The grunt of respect.

He spends the afternoon at the disused quarry that lies about a mile from his housing estate, eating his packed lunch only when hunger spikes his stomach. The salmon-paste sandwiches taste damp and slimy, reminding the boy of the lorry driver's spit, arcing heavy and dense, landing with a splat on the black-sponge tarmac. He puts the sandwiches to one side, forcing one last bite down his throat.

He sits cross-legged on a shunt of rock that juts over the deepest part of the pond; birds scythe through the sky. Duckweed covers the surface in mats, interspersed with breaks of water the colour of liquorice. The air seems to hang heavy and doleful over the quarry, dense and thickened like the air in a forgotten room. It reminds him of the silences his mother weaves around the memory of his father. He thinks of the screams she carries in her mouth, cries that rise from her lips like disturbed crows when she drinks.

He can remember his aunt Teezy's arms round him, the smell of soda flour and carbolic soap. He can remember the whispered soothings, her rocking him back and forth on her lap. Beyond in the next room, he remembers seeing his mother's face. Around her people stoop to press her hands; suited men, their cigarettes winking like wizards' eyes in the darkened room, and women standing by her, their faces glowing like lanterns of concern. His mother, a coin head silhouette against the flank of her husband's closed coffin. All this a long time ago when his language rose like bubbles in his throat, and popped formless on the point of his lips.

He remembers the squeal of anguish that came from his mother when two men came to the house that day to pay their respects. They stood before the coffin with a stiff lock to their backs, heads stooped, fists clasped at the base of their spines. He can still see the change in his mother's face as they turned to pay their respects to her. A sound came from her mouth that had raised the hairs on the boy's arms and brought tears to his eyes.

He remembers endless nights in dark rooms, his eyes confused between sleeping and waking. Then there were the times when he woke in the middle of the night and felt the presence of someone nearby. He would lie there and listen to the sobs. He knew it was her, his mother, come to stand by his bed and weep hard tears, gin giving her tongue a loosened power, and a longing for the mouth of the one who was gone.

Then there was the time shortly after, when he had stayed with his aunt Teezy in her small house in the centre of town. He had been told that his mother needed some time, that she hadn't been very well, that she needed to be fixed just like a car when the road had got the better of it. He remembers looking up into Teezy's wide face as she told him, and the false smile of courage that his face suddenly wore.

As the sun begins to fade he leaves the quarry, throwing what's left of his sandwiches into the dark water, watching for a moment as they sit on the mat of duckweed, then disappear. As he climbs a barbed-wire fence to rejoin the main road leading to his housing estate, he frightens a pair of birds into scrambled flight. He looks at them as they veer skywards, watching them strain upwards. He thinks then of the lorry driver and his hushed respect for his father's memory.

‘A true Irishman lived and died.’ That was what the lorry driver had said. A true Irishman died only for Ireland, didn't he? Ireland herself would tolerate nothing less.

A Young Patriot's Death for Ireland

I love Ireland, I love her small narrow skies, I love her little shape on the maps, I am about to die for Ireland. I will become immortal, I will live in the songs that old men will sing … Women will cry in wonder at my heroism. My mother will carry my picture and show strangers who I was, and she will cry, I will take my gun and kill. I will destroy. My blood will be a river that other patriots bathe in, finding strength in my heroism.

She knows, my mother knows. This is the way it has always been, Ireland needs our blood to breathe, she needs our bodies to hold on to herself. My gun is old but it will do the job, I will take as many of them as I can. I will enjoy their dark-eyed fear as my bullets rip into their cold hearts.

I take my leave, I tell my mother to look for me in the night sky for tonight a new star will be there. She is crying. I tell her I am taking the dark journey. I tell her I will be joining my father tonight in Ireland's heaven, where the rivers are green like our fields. Yes, I tell her tonight, I will be with my father in Heaven, two true Irishmen lived and died. She smiles, even though she is crying.

The barracks is quiet. I tell the desk sergeant that my mother's car has been stolen. He doesn't glance at me but looks at his watch as I talk. I wait until a couple of his colleagues join him and then I rip my gun from the shopping-bag I'm carrying. I enjoy the surprise that flits across their faces and the lost expressions in their eyes. I kill two of them before I am shot. Not a bad return. As life leaves my ripped body I see heaven hover before me like an vast alien spaceship. Manning its bridge and beckoning me aboard is my father, another true Irishman lived and died.

2. Sully

‘Get up … James, up.’

‘What?’

‘Up … Out of it and up.’

He opens his eyes. His mother is standing over him, barking at him. She is hung-over: he can tell by the sideways droop of her head.

‘Come on … Up. We have a visitor.’

‘Who?’

‘Sully.’

‘Shit.’

‘Hey … None of that … Two minutes … And up.’

She leaves the bedroom. He catches her taking a peek at herself in the wall mirror as she exits, running a moistened finger across her eyebrows. She has a thing about her eyebrows, always teasing and pulling at them, coaxing them into arced crescents. It revolts him. She revolts him. Sully revolts him.

Sully was his mother's on-off, come and go boyfriend. He arrived one May evening five years before, announced by the rasp of his van's exhaust as it growled along their estate. James had been in the front field, guillotining the tops of ragweed with his hands and feet, when he heard the vroom of Sully's arrival. He had run to the hedge that bordered the estate and arrived just in time to see Sully get out of the van and run the toe of each shiny shoe on the back of his flared trouser legs before he sauntered up to the front door. James had watched the flush come to his mother's cheek as she had greeted him, the shyness with which she had received the small box of chocolates, then offered her lips to him, closing her eyes in a way that James found devastating.

‘Hey, kid – Luke Sullivan. My friends call me Sully, but you can call me Luke.’

He can remember looking up into his cat-grin face, squinting into the blister of the afternoon sun as it peeped out from behind Sully's head. He can remember the nervous way the man had tousled his hair, and how his mother had glared at him from behind Sully's back.

‘Get up.’

Eventually, he jumps out of bed and dresses, pulling on his jeans over his pyjama bottoms, cursing softly in the cold air. He can hear their giggles down on the pathway leading up to the front house.

‘Come on and see what Sully has brought us.’

Sully was back with his maudlin country music and his taunting smile. Crawling back to terrorise his mother once more, as he always has, as it seems he always will.

‘James, come and see,’ his mother shouts. She sounds like a fishwife, her voice cutting through the still morning air.

What had he brought this time? What peace-offering was he laying at her feet? Once it had been bricks freshly lifted from a building site he was working on. He had proudly shown them to James, saying that he was going to build his mother ‘the finest and securest garden shed known to man’. Another time it was the carcass of a freshly killed pig, which he had hung proudly from a hook in the garage, saying it was a neighbour's and that it had strayed out on to a busy road. He said that it had been looked after like a child when alive and that it would melt in their mouths. His mother screamed when she saw it, throwing her hands to her face and running for the house.

He thuds his way down the stairs and steps out of the front door, working up a large fist of spit in his mouth, hawking it deep from within his throat, then launching it just like the lorry driver had done the week before.

‘Look! Look, Jimmy – oh, please, don't do that. You're not an animal.’

No, but Sully is. He looks at them both. They look like they're posing for a photograph. On the pathway lies a huge mound of logs. It reminds him of a large goat dropping. His mother stands beside Sully, as if she has just won a raffle. So that was it, that was his penance: a mound of wet, mouldy logs.

‘Hi, kid. Long time no see,’ Sully says.

‘For fuck's sake.’ He says it quietly as he turns to go back in.

‘What did you say?’ his mother asks.

‘What?’

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Don't be disrespectful.’

‘He says it.’

‘He's an adult. He can use those words.’

‘Leave him be, Ann,’ Sully says.

Before Sully there had been other men. James noticed that they all had the same tight force in their eyes. Some stayed longer than others, and some were so brief that their faces melted quickly from memory like a lantern lighting a man's way home slowly being swallowed by blackness.

He can remember looking up into each new face, his eyes narrowed in distress as yet another stranger tried to woo him. Sometimes James believes he dreamed some of them, but he knows this was not the case.

He remembers being in bed one night. He woke and felt the presence of someone sitting at the end of it. He can remember his body freezing in a spasm of fear. The smell of cheap whisky filled the room, and the pale sickly scent of aftershave.

It was a builder his mother had met a few weeks before. A large shaven-headed man, who didn't smile but viewed the world with thin-lipped distrust. When he had been introduced to James he had bent down stiffly extending his hand, his scalp pitted and cracked with scars. His eyes were large and seemed to bore straight into James. He didn't like the man. He didn't like the way he shadowed his mother as if she was a lassoed calf, following her about the house, watching every move she made. His left arm was covered in tattoos, deep blue-green drawings of half-clad women, their cartoon bodies pouting from the bristle of his arm. He frightened James, and when he was in their house there seemed nowhere to escape to, because he seemed to fill every part of it.

They had brought James with them to the local working-man's club earlier that night. He can remember riding in the back seat of the builder's Ford Granada. The seats smelt musty and were covered with dog-hair, and the ashtray in the well between the two seats was full of mint-humbug wrappers. The journey seethed with silence, punctuated only by the squeak of the passenger seat's visor as his mother pulled it down to check her makeup in the mirror.

Excitement scurried in his stomach as he looked forward to his evening at the club. His mother had told him earlier that the only reason they were bringing him was that she couldn't find a babysitter and he was too young to be left on his own.

He can remember the layers of smoke that hung in the air, the cigarette butts and the dried circles of spit dotting the floor like ringworm rounds. It was a large cavernous room with long runs of fluorescent lighting, filled with steel-tube chairs. Groups of drinkers sat together, ringed by empty and half-empty glasses. They were mostly men, their nicotine fingers jabbing the air like small yellow stems.

Young men carried laden trays of drinks to and fro, their slim hips slipping expertly between cluttered tables. They all wore white shirts and flared black trousers, and pocketed their tips quickly with deft thrusts of their hands.

At one point a man stopped by the table. He knew the builder and greeted him with a soft punch on his shoulder. ‘Hi, Clive, how's it hanging?’ He had only one eye, and the left side of his face was disfigured by a twisted mesh of scars.

Clive greeted the man as ‘Nelson’, then winked at James's mother and laughed. James couldn't take his eyes off him. He thought Nelson looked like a mannequin after it had been caught in a shop blaze. The man was drunk and at one point threw a look at James, staring at him with his one good eye, his head bobbing to a jaunty tune it seemed that only he could hear. James remembers trying to avoid looking at the scar, the dense shadow that nestled there.

Before he left Nelson turned to Clive and stuck out a hand. After a moment Clive reached into his pocket and placed a few coins in the man's palm. James watched him walk away, and noted that he hadn't said thanks, just took the money and moved on to the next table and hit a small wiry man who sat there a punch of greeting on the shoulder. James had been put at a small side-table, next to his mother's larger one, and given a Lucozade and a bag of crisps. He remembers his feet dangling from his chair, banging against its steel limbs. He watched as Clive and his mother sat and sipped their drinks, staring into the middle distance like people who had just suffered a loss.

As soon as they had finished, one of the young waiters was called over and a new tray of drinks arrived.

Periodically Clive would throw a hopeful glance at James's mother. James remembers how her eyes glittered. She looked as if her mind was hunting, stalking some hidden paradise, far beyond the thin walls of her life.

By the end of the evening they had been joined by a young red-headed man, his skin the colour of milk. He sat beside James's mother and seemed to know her quite well, a little sly smile coming to his face whenever he spoke to her. James can remember watching the three, from his side-table, sipping his flat Lucozade noting how their bodies were halved by the table-top. He became fascinated by the shuffling dance of their legs beneath it, seeing the red-head's feet slide to within inches of his mother's, his right foot begin tickling her ankle knot. Above, in the more visible half, he saw a smile flash across her lips and watched as she dipped her head.