“I just want to find her,” I said. ‘Tell her Mother’s dead.”
“I know,” Feargal said. “I killed her. Here. In this. Down in the molecules.”
“Just tell me where she’s gone. That’s all I want to know.”
“She won’t know you. She won’t remember you.”
More than Mother had been killed in that memory-imprinter. Louise died. Little Sean and Liam died. Da died. I died. Her sister, her nephews, her father, her brother. Everyone she had ever known. Pixie-faced Clionadh in her girlie dress and tartan tights; Tarroweep channeling in yet another persona: dead. Then my understanding inverted in that big, cold attic. It was Kerry who had died. The flesh moved on, the skin and the senses, but Kerry O’Neill was buried in the soft folds of her cerebral cortex. Inverse metempsychosis. You don’t come back as someone else. Someone else comes back as you.
I had lost her.
I was out of the attic and half a flight of stairs down before I was aware of Clionadh’s heels clattering after me. I heard them stop and her shout out.
“Why don’t you just tell him?”
I turned and looked up the stairs. Feargal was in the open attic door.
“What good would it do?”
“What hurt would it do?”
Feargal’s laugh was coldly resonant in the stairwell.
“You ask me that, Clionadh/Tarroweep? A multi asks me where the hurt is in something coming back from your former life?”
The black anger inside me was just cold, hard sickness now. Gone.
“What former life?” Clionadh shouted defiantly. “There is no former life! You took it away. There’s nothing to hurt her. But even for the chance to just see her, why hurt him?”
Feargal closed his eyes, rubbed the palm of his hand across his beard. He sighed. His breath steamed.
“We got principles here, you know. Hell, she’s at Twelve Willows Community. Up north. Place called Ballydrain. County Down. On the big lough. Dara. She’s called Dara. Dara McGann. She won’t know you. Understand that. Be gentle. You hurt her, I’ll find you, friend.”
“I wouldn’t hurt her,” I said. “I’m her brother. Her family.”
“Family hurts hardest and deepest. Brother.”
A new wind had come down from the northeast, born in the great Siberian taiga, spreading unexpected cold and frost over Ireland. Winter always takes us by surprise in this country. The road north out of Dublin was a grind of nervy drivers and gritting trucks spraying salty shrapnel. Hitchers with cardboard signs for points north huddled on the verges in their inadequate clothes, disconsolate as winter crows. My car was too full of doubts and justifications for any other passengers.
Time. Time. Time. And excuses. Ten days lost. Too busy at work. Couldn’t get time off. Pre-Christmas rush starting. Ma’s estate to settle. Excuses. Ten days while I debated the rights and wrongs, and listed the pros and the cons, and decided for and against a dozen times each day, and made my mind up one way, and then the other, and then changed it again; about going to see Kerry. Dara.
Then the calendar told me this morning—Saturday morning—that it was December come Monday, and in a surge of dread, anticipation, and adrenaline, I found myself past the airport halfway down a tail-back behind a gritter truck, heading north. If December came and I did not see Kerry—Dara—I never would. It was a November thing. The dying month.
Beyond Drogheda, the traffic cleared and the road opened. Low mist carpeted the plain of Louth, ankle deep, golden in the clear light. Forty kilometers across Dundalk Bay, the Cooley Hills were dusted with slight snow. North. We are a northern people, we Ui Neill. Appropriate that Kerry should return to the ancestral lands. I passed lay-bys and picnic areas crowded with the brightly painted transports of the traveling people. Smoke rose from their cooking fires. Children in colorful knitwear played with untrustworthy-looking dogs; dreadlocked, bearded men saluted gravely. I raised my hand to them in return. The women all looked cold. A nomadic nation. Rootless.
I began to explore what Kerry had done to herself in terms of a colossal act of self-definition. I am what I choose myself to be. I reject the self that is chosen for me. The Ma-made self. The uncertain, fearful, malleable self. I annihilate it. Down among the neurochemicals, I erase it with precise pulses of electricity and built in its place the self that I invent.
We are a tribe of putter-uppers, we Ui Neill. All we ever had was a choice of hells; so better to endure the lesser than risk the possibility of a greater. Put up. Shut up. Kids don’t know that this is not normality. That this is not what family life should be. We can’t be unusual, it must be the same for everyone else and they don’t complain. Put up, shut up. Such conditioning can only be undone as deeply and painstakingly as it was done. Molecule by molecule. Cell by cell. Memory by memory. It’s true, what the women who do it say: it takes more courage to leave than to stay.
I came up through Ravensdale, the old gap of the North. Snow lay in the lee of the hedgerows up by the old border. Down into Newry, then east of north-east, by B-roads along the northern flanks of the Mourne Mountains, through the neo-villages and techno-hamlets of the new tribes.
Kerry’s—Dara’s: I must not think of her by that other name—motivations were clear and honest. My own were obscure. I had realized when Feargal showed me the machine in the tenement attic that my role as bearer of news and repealer of exile was meaningless. I had no reason to find her. She had no reason to be found. Except that the detective-self could not walk away from an incomplete case. Except that my appearance out of an erased past, bearing dubious gifts, was no more selfish than Kerry’s valuing me so little that she could blithely un-create me. I wanted to see her. I wanted to know that my sister’s flesh still walked, and might talk to me. Once might be enough. To have not found her, to have left it open: how Ma would have loved that! Failed again, Stephen! That last fence would always be too high. Kerry’s courage was to transform; mine was to find what she had transformed into. In November.
Up into the drumlin country of Down; those strange rounded glacial hillocks, clustered like eggs in a basket. Mist clung in the hollows between them. By the waterside communities of Strangford Lough; the boats reefed down for winter, the flocks of migrant Greenland geese working across the mud-flats. Through a speaking son, a deaf mussel-farming community directed me to Ballydrain and Twelve Willows.
The name was appropriate. The community cultured genetweak willow for the biomass power station up at the head of the lough. Accelerated growth and intensive coppicing gave two crops a year. The road wound a kilometer and a half between low drumlins studded with the twiggy crowns of willow before the turn-off to the community. I drove another kilometer and a half down a muddy lane rutted by cutters and timber transporters before a shield of woven willow twigs on the farm gate welcomed me to Twelve Willows. The community was a collection of sheds, silos, and portable buildings surrounding a much-extended Victorian farmhouse. Two large articulated timber transporters with trailers were being loaded in the yard by forklift. A lot of people were standing around, drinking coffee from a big vacuum flask. They looked very young. Tribe people do. There were lots of dogs and children. The men favored facial hair. The place smelled of wood chips, mud, and cold salt from the lough shore behind the farmhouse.
“Hello, I’m Stephen O’Neill,” I said to the first person I met, a black-bearded man with a Bolivian-style knitted helmet. “I’m looking for”—careful—“Dara McGann. I heard she lives here.”