“Dara. Yes.” It was the woman operating the coffee flagon who answered. She was looking at me quizzically. “You are?”
Careful.
“A relative.”
The coffee woman nodded.
“Close relative? You’re the spit of her.”
“We’re all like peas in a pod, us O’Neills-McGanns.”
“I can see that. Coffee?” I was offered a foam styrene cup. I accepted it gratefully. “I’m afraid Dara’s not down at the house at the moment; she’s cutting up on the back fifty. I can’t say how long she might be; if you like, I’ll take you up there on the quad; you’ll never find it on your own.”
Another offer gratefully accepted. The coffee woman—Maura; her real identity? was every Twelve Willower formerly someone else?—took me on the back of a smoky all-terrain buggy up between the rows of tall willow wands. The wind from off the lough drew odd sighs and laments from the thin branches. A cutting machine was working the third hillside over, an oily yellow insect with voracious mandibles that bit the willow off at ground level and packed the rods into a metal basket on its back.
“Dara! Someone to see you!”
The machine turned at the end of a row and stopped. The driver stepped down. I climbed off the quad and walked toward the cutting machine. Maura turned her vehicle and drove away.
She was dressed in work boots, skinny jeans gone green at the knees, a grubby Aran sweater under a padded Puffa jacket. She had grown her hair, dyed it a deeper, glossier black, wrapped braids in colored thread. She had lost weight. Her skin seemed darker. She stood with her feet apart, head slightly to one side as she studied me. She was frowning gently. I had never seen that frown before; I could not read it. I could not read her stance, her body language, her face, her hair, her clothes, anything about her.
I spoke a name. I was not certain which one.
The frown deepened.
“Who are you?” The voice was softer, lower.
“A relative. I’m…”
“I don’t remember any cousins like you. What’s your name?”
“Stephen. Stephen O’Neill.”
Her face was suspicious now, her stance aggressive.
“Just who the hell are you? I don’t know you.”
“Don’t you recognize me?”
“I see your face. You look like me. But T don’t know you. I don’t remember you. Who are you, Mr. Stephen O’Neill?”
I could walk or I could speak. There was another fence, right at the finish. The highest fence of all. It was not enough for me just to see. Things only ended properly with an act.
My breath hung in the frosty air in the field of cut willow.
“I’m your brother.”
Dara lived in one of the mobile huts outlying the farmhouse. It smelled of fresh paint, new, cheap carpet, old incense, and garlic. It was drafty, and I could feel it shift on its blocks as the wind eddied underneath it. The one redeeming feature—and a considerable one—was the panoramic window overlooking the shore, the lough, and beyond it the sudden, startling lone hill of Scrabo, surmounted by a tower. I watched the Brent geese move across the sands before the incoming tide, searching for eel grass. Dara made herb tea.
Kerry had despised herb tea.
There were not many things in the chilly cabin. Few of the accumulated impedimenta of a life.
“You’ve got a bloody nerve.”
I clutched my herb tea and struggled with the quiet inner strangling of guilt.
“This is my life, you know? My life. I say what happens in it, and I don’t want people barging into it telling me they’re my long-lost brothers, or whatever the hell else relations are out there. If I’d wanted a brother, I’d remember a brother. But all I remember is cousins. I’m an only.”
I winced.
“You don’t remember me at all?”
“I remember the discontinuity. I remember Feargal and the others, and the Mountjoy project.”
“The scanner.” The memory-damping pills, with doves stamped on them.
“You’ve been there?”
“Yes. How else could I have found you?”
“Jesus Christ, man! Did you ever stop to think that maybe, just maybe, the reason I did all this was because I didn’t want to be found? I see your face. I see the similarities and I know, intellectually, that there was another life that I can’t remember. I believe you are my brother from that life, but I don’t know you. For all I know, you could be the reason I don’t remember you. You could have raped me six times a night. I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”
“Or you could have raped your sister,” I said, careful not to spill any of the anger within.
“Yes.”
“Or murdered her. Or murdered your mother.”
“Yes.”
“You could have done anything; there could be any number of reasons for you to have done what you did.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t know. You can’t know. You have to trust me. You see, the truth is, that you did murder someone, Dara. You murdered my sister.” For an instant, I thought that she would smash me across the face with her mug of herb tea, or at least throw me out. I had never seen such darkness in Kerry’s eyes. But I held her gaze, and the moment passed. I held the gaze for a long time.
“Do you want to know?” I asked. “So that you will have no doubts? It can’t hurt you. It’s only a story. Do you want to hear it?”
“Can I believe you?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
I told her. It was a long time telling. It was not a tale where a few spectacular scenes would summarize and explain all. It was a slow dripping tale of a thousand, ten thousand tiny things, hour in, hour out, year in, year out, that wore away any sense of worth or individuality or hope or dream. Ten thousand stupid things. Ma’s tantrums, her packing her bags and storming out to her sister’s every time we would not eat our cabbage. Food controclass="underline" only giving us things we hated to eat. Screaming fits in our teenages, when we would unexpectedly not come home for dinner. Being made to sit until the grease coagulated on the plate because we would not finish our Sunday dinners. Her inability to perform any domestic chore. Clothes unwashed, or never ready when you needed them; house un-vacu-umed and un-dusted; dishes unwashed. But if you tried to help, you were bloody bitches and bastards, trying to show her up. Personal hygiene. She stank. She would only wash if she was going out. She begrudged us hot water. Shampoo, a luxury. Toothpaste, outrageous. Yet she told us our teeth were black and rotting in our heads and threatened us with the dentist, who would rip them all out and give us agonizingly painful dentures. I remember—I will never forget—the day I saw her in the bedroom reaching down into her pants to remove a sanitary napkin. But when Louise and Kerry started their periods, she refused to buy them feminine hygiene products, but gave them cut-up ironing board covers to slip into their gussets.
Always always someone else’s fault. Da’s for being a feckless husband and not earning as much as Mrs. Downey next-door’s husband. For having to be married to him, and not Mr. Donnelly the chiropodist, who would have amounted to something. Ours, for being bad, ungrateful, bloody bitches and bastards. For being Da’s, and not Mr. Donnelly the chiropodist’s. For living in Finglass—many stations lower than she expected of herself—where the neighbors did nothing but talk about her: that Mrs. O’Neill, thinks herself too good for the likes of us, the bloody bitch. Never never content. Everything you did was wrong. Right things were wrong, or she made them go wrong. Never a trip out or a holiday she didn’t ruin. Never a friend of ours she didn’t disapprove of, or whose mother she did not envy. Never never proud of us. I, the underachiever. Expected to be an accountant. Big house, big family, big future. Reality: a job in the bank, a flat in Dartry, single at thirty-two, a dream of poetry. Louise: to be a spinster primary school teacher. Coffee shop in Tallaght; husband and sons I was supposed to engender. Kerry: nothing. Imagination ran out at the inconvenient third child. Maybe a job in a shop. Maybe married. Certainly not college education. Certainly not five years in Dublin’s top animation studio, producing award-winning pieces for ads and title sequences. Certainly not Dr. Collins’s Fitzwilliam Square office, or the flat across the landing from Clionadh/Tarroweep in the house of multiple personalities, or the brain scanner in the big dark Mountjoy tenement attic. Or a winter hillside of green willow.