The light ebbed from the sky. The tide grew full and the geese moved ashore to roost among the tussocks of salt grass. Dara moved about the room, lighting candles. I sat in the center of a constellation of tiny flames, shaking with emotion.
“Jesus, Steve.”
“Stephen. I’m a Stephen. Always was.”
“Stephen, I don’t know what to feel. What you told me, no kid should have to go through that. It shouldn’t happen. It’s not right. It’s against everything that’s right. But I can’t feel it. I can feel it for you, but not for me. She wasn’t my mother. She’s not what I remember.”
“What do you remember?”
She took a deep breath.
“I remember a white house with black paint. Gravel drive. Trees around it. A garden with hidden places where I played. No sisters, no brothers. Lots of friends, though. Lots of cousins. I remember a dog called Barney and a cat called Cat who slept on my bed though I wasn’t supposed to let him. The sun shone a lot. Summers were hot, winters were ice and snow. You could hear trains in the house, and if you opened the windows, the sea. The kitchen smelled of coffee and baking and something I realize now is garlic. There was a big rotting Victorian wrought-iron conservatory on the sunny side of the house. Full of ferns. Mum would work there in all seasons. She was a writer. I was scared of her computer when she got it. I thought it would pull me in through the screen into the grey nothingness behind. Dad was in money, somehow. I’m still not sure exactly what. They were big, my parents. Not physically. Emotionally. Big happiness. Big laughter. Big joy. Big anger. Big love. Big hate. They sent me to dancing lessons, and drawing. They came to my school nativity play. They stuck my paintings up on the fridge, they listened to me read my school stories, they watched me dance in the conservatory. They gathered shells with me on the beach when we walked Barney. They gave me driving lessons. They were okay about lending me the car. They tried to get me to call them by their Christian names. They tried not to dislike my boyfriends on principle. They were glad when I went to study art and video. They came to my degree show. They bought me champagne at my graduation, and again when I began my first job, and again when I moved out into my first flat.
“They died in a car crash in Wexford when I was twenty-two.”
The candle flames flickered; a draft, stolen in from the dark lough.
“Stephen, you all right?”
I realized that my cheeks were wet. Silent tears, for the deaths of parents that never lived. For the childhoods we should have lived. The childhoods of encouragement and approval and attention and devotion, where the pain was sharp and cut cleanly, not gnawing and gangrenous. Who was Stephen O’Neill to say it was not real? Dara McGann was building the rest of her life around what was inside her skull, and what more can any of us know than what that inner cinema projects onto the bone screen?
A good life. Maybe a better life.
“Stephen? You okay?” She poured me a whiskey. Kerry had been a clear spirits drinker. I nodded. My breath shuddered. “Stephen. Do you really have to go back to Dublin tonight?”
Dara’s sofa was hard, her bed-throw thin and her cabin chilly but I slept like a god resting after creation. We had made it late over to the Big House the night before—eating was communal at Twelve Willows. A couple of vanloads had already gone into nearby Newtownards in search of nightlife, but enough stayed behind to scrape us together two platefuls of leftovers and a couple of bottles from the community cellars. The food was vegetarian, and very good even to an unreconstructed carnivore. After much Guinness, instruments were broken out, and we played and sang our way through the hoariest numbers in the Old-Folkies-in-Aran-Sweaters song-book. They’d do it at the drop of a hat when there were sojourners in, Dara told me. Picking my way over the frost back to her cabin, I realized a strange thing. I was happy. Food, company, music. The ancient tradition of hospitality of the Culdee mystics, whose ruined monasteries ringed this lough, was reborn in the new orders and communities. Simple gifts. Direct living. Being, without necessarily becoming. Becoming, in its own time, like the shoots of green willow. I envied Dara her new life and family.
Sundays in Twelve Willows were only worked if you wanted to. Dara didn’t. She took me out along the lough shore. The frost had settled hard in the night. Mist clung to the lough, glowing in the November sun, blurring the boundary between land and water. I shivered in my borrowed parka and Wellington boots and followed Dara’s footprints out across the sand.
“What was she like?” she asked when I caught up with her. “What did she do? Who was she?”
“Bitter. Compassionate. Wild. Then again, always afraid. Contradictory. Tremendous, terrifying mood swings. From incredible, devouring energy to absolute desolation.”
“Manic depressive?”
“No. I don’t think it was clinical like that. She had to stop herself. She couldn’t allow herself to go too far, achieve too much, be too free. Something had to pull her back to what she had been told all her life she was. Useless. Worthless. A waste of womb-space.”
“Happy?”
“What does that mean?”
“What did she do?”
“She was an animator. She was brilliant; these freaky, scratchy, creaky collages out of old toys and dolls and bits of bone and wire. Won awards. Only she was so brilliant she kept her job, when the depressions hit her. You kept that bit of her.”
“I was never brilliant. I would never have done anything like she did. Afraid to pay the price of brilliance. Stephen, what was her name?”
“Kerry.”
She did not repeat it, not even shape her lips silently around it. Dara walked on over the tide-rippled sand. In the distance a flock of geese grazed, black atoms in the bright mist.
“What about you, Stephen?”
“What about me?”
“Happy?”
“I have a job I hate; no friends, can’t get a woman, bursting for a shag, don’t get out, going nowhere. And I find my sister has changed into another person and does not even know who I am.”
“Who are you?”
“In here?” I touched my hand to the parka quilting. “I don’t know.”
“What would you like to be?”
The words came in a rush, like many wings.
“A poet.” I blushed instantly. Dara saw it and smiled.
“What’s stopping you?”
I knew the answer to that, but I was not brave enough to speak it. Dara continued.
“There are a thousand places like this where you’re allowed to be whatever you want to be. A thousand ways to be Stephen O’Neill.”
I stopped walking. Water oozed from the sandy impress of my borrowed boots.
“Dara. There’s something I’d like you to have. Something that was Kerry’s, that she left behind.”