So much for their delicacy! They had brought him up unable to utter the most commonplace of oaths, a man of refined feeling, a fist of prickles as spiny as a hedgehog, and all along he’d been abnormally sired, a monstrosity, a freak. No wonder he couldn’t tell anyone else to kiss his arse or eat shit. He had eaten shit himself.
He made a further unwelcome discovery going through his parents’ papers. It wasn’t they who had run to this extremity of the country to escape scandal. They had grown up here. Again he was having to read between the lines, but it seemed it was their parents, at least on his mother’s side, who had bolted. Why that was he couldn’t tell. Were they cousins too?
So what, by the infernal laws of genetic mathematics, did that make him? A monstrosity, four or even sixteen times over?
iii
It was Ailinn’s adoptive mother’s opinion that Ailinn had been abused when she was a little girl. Nothing else quite accounted for her bouts of morose absentness.
Ailinn shook her head. ‘I’d remember it, Mother,’ she said.
It didn’t come naturally to her to call her mother-who-wasn’t ‘Mother’. And she could see that her mother-who-wasn’t didn’t care for it either. But she tried. They both did.
‘You say you’d remember it, but that depends how old you were when it happened.’
‘Believe me, it didn’t happen.’
‘I believe you that you don’t remember, but there’s a mechanism in the human heart that helps us to forget.’
‘Then mightn’t that be because we’re meant to forget,’ Ailinn replied, ‘because it doesn’t matter?’
‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’
Was it? Ailinn didn’t think so. What you don’t remember might as well not have happened. Remember everything and you have no future. Unless what you remember is mostly pleasant, and it didn’t occur to Ailinn to imagine memory as pleasant.
Her own memory went back a long way. She heard the distant reverberations, like echoes trapped in a steel coffin. She just didn’t know what it was she was remembering.
‘So at the end of your life,’ her mother went on, ‘when you have little or no memory left. .’
‘That’s right, you might as well not have lived it.’
‘God help you for saying such a thing. I hope for your sake you won’t be feeling that way when you’re old.’
Ailinn laughed. ‘It could be a blessing,’ she said.
But even she knew her cynicism was bravado. Deep within her was a hunger for life to start, to aim herself towards a time when she would not regret having lived. She would outpace memory if she could.
They were at home, drinking tea and dunking biscuits at a scrubbed pine table, looking out over a ploughed field. A crow with a crazed orange eye was hopping with malign purpose from rut to rut. What sort of memory did he have, Ailinn wondered. How many thousands of crows past had it taken to teach him what he knew? And of them, of any of them — what knowledge did he have? Of his own past, even — just yesterday, for example — how much did he know?
Ailinn was nineteen. She had lived in this house how many years now. .? Twelve, thirteen? It should no longer, whatever the exact computation, have felt foreign to her. But its dry formality: the teapot with its woolly hat, the floral china tea set, the biscuits carefully arranged on the plate, three ginger, three chocolate digestive, the silver tongs for the sugar cubes, the perfectly ploughed field which, by screwing up one eye, she could move from the horizontal to the vertical plane, as though its parallel furrows were a ladder to the heavens, even her weary-eyed, unsmiling adoptive mother who had never quite become her mother proper — all this was to her the setting for some other nineteen-year-old’s life. As for where hers was, that she didn’t yet know.
She was artistic. A further reason to think she’d been abused. She drew in pastels: the rising field, the scrubbed table, her would-be mother (not her would-be father who found her skills uncanny and disconcerting), the demoniacal crows — great luminous, visionary canvases which her teachers admired for their ethereal, other-worldly atmosphere, though one of them feared her work was a little too reminiscent of Kokoschka’s dreamscapes. ‘Where do you go to in your head, Ailinn?’ he asked her.
‘I don’t go anywhere,’ she said, ‘I just draw what I see.’
She knew she was lying. She did go somewhere. She didn’t have a name for it, that was all.
And she didn’t know why she went there or what it was a memory or a foreboding, or just an idle fantasy, of.
The paper flowers were a sort of peace offering to her adoptive mother. Something nice to show how much she loved her, how grateful she was, how protected and at home she felt. But even the paper flowers looked as though they’d been picked from some other planet.
iv
Kevern had wondered, when he’d first discovered his depraved inheritance, whether it would put him off sex. That it should put him off sex, he didn’t doubt. But would it?
The answer was no. Or at least not entirely. He knew he had to take precautions. He couldn’t bring into the world a being who might show recessive symptoms of a kind which he — so far, at least — had not. And this meant not only being particular when it came to contraception, but going about coitus gently and considerately. Restoring to the act, maybe, something of the sacred. As it happened, such conscientiousness was not difficult for him: it accorded well with his precise, reluctant nature. He had not been put on earth to fling his seed around.
Ailinn didn’t mind that he didn’t pile-drive himself into her. It made a change.
‘Sleepin’ with you is like sleepin’ with a woman,’ she told him.
Though a clean enunciator out of bed, she made a habit of dropping her gs when verbalising sex. Sleepin’, screwin’, fuckin’, even makin’ love. He didn’t know why. To rough herself up a bit, perhaps. Or perhaps to rough up him.
‘Is that northern speech?’ he had asked her.
‘Nah. It’s my speech.’ With which she made a triumphant, tarty little fist.
So yes, it was her way of communalising their sex, taking what was special out of it, making it less fragile, putting them both on a more ordinary footing with each other.
Did she find him overscrupulous? Would she have liked him to swear? (Pog mo hoin?)
He unwound himself and sat up. They were in his bed. She had invited him to hers, an altogether more sweetly smelling chamber now that she had got rid of all the spiders and repainted it, with giant paper sunflowers everywhere, but he was uneasy about staying away from his cottage all night. And besides, he lived alone and she didn’t.
‘So “sleepin’” with me is like “sleepin’” with a woman. . I’m guessing you mean that as a compliment, though to me, of course, it isn’t. Unless you prefer sleeping with women.’
‘Never done it,’ she said.
‘So how do you know it’s like sleeping with me?’
‘Because sleepin’ with you isn’t like sleepin’ with other men.’
Men! Couldn’t she have spared him that?
‘How isn’t it like sleeping with other men?’
‘Well you don’t seem as though you want to hurt me, for a start.’
‘Why would I hurt you? Do you want me to hurt you?’