It was hard for me here to begin with, and it made no difference that the hardship was mostly of my own making. I couldn’t help myself; I felt I had Protestant written in neon lights across my back. Liam was never done telling me that it was the opposite. He said once folk heard the North in my voice they assumed I was Catholic, for Northern Protestants never came this far south, or not to live. He told me, but I couldn’t listen, I was too used to scanning everyone and everything, too deeply tuned to the fact or conviction that difference meant threat.
As well as that, I missed the North. There was a gritty excitement about it, especially if you were young and not worn down, not paying the price in grief or in prison visits. There, violence was the stamp of reality—at the very least it was the yardstick by which you measured reality—and once you’re used to the hit of danger it’s hard to wind down and adjust to a seamless flow of days. That’s the way of violence—it drowns out the subtle, despises the ordinary, barges straight to the head of the queue. Here everything was always the same, and how could you know you were even alive if mayhem and chaos didn’t lep from the radio every time you turned it on? Sometimes I thought I’d fallen through time and landed facedown in a featherbed to smother in its softness.
With me, it was “in the North this or in the North that”—I was always on about it, always bringing it up. Mostly folk changed the subject, as if what I’d said was foolishness or bad taste. Or that’s what I thought then; now I think they were just bewildered. And on the whole they were amazingly patient with me. Patient and polite.
As for the Wildwood, it kept its distance. I had odd flashes—a blur and change at the edge of my vision—but nothing that stayed around or turned into anything else. And these shadowy “sightings” (for want of a better word) were always easy to deal with. I’d only to shake my head as you’d see off a fly, and they’d vanish away.
“You’re learning to handle yourself,” Liam had said when I told him.
I wasn’t at all, though I didn’t say that, and I soon learned to keep my own counsel. I was avoiding even thinking about it, just forgetting as fast and as hard as I could and leaving well alone.
We still had a permanent cash-flow problem, so I’d do a few evenings in one of the pubs if there were any hours going begging. There never were at the start, but once people knew my face and who I was they’d ask from time to time. I always liked bar work—I’d done it in Belfast, after Queens, when I couldn’t get what my mother called “a proper job.”
By then you would never have thought our house was the same place I’d first stepped into. It was snug and dry, the windows were sound, and it was painted white inside from one end to the other. We’d knocked the middle room into the kitchen so it wasn’t poky and wee anymore, and we’d fired out the cooker and put in a range that we had off one of Liam’s sisters, who was busy updating. It had its drawbacks, that range: it was solid fuel, so you had to be there to fill it, and you couldn’t run radiators off it the way you can with the newer models. Just the same the kitchen was always warm, and the water was spanking hot. I love the kitchen—it’s mine and I keep it scrubbed clean as the dairy at Gran’s, and mostly it smells of baking. I like the rest of the house as well. It’s home, I don’t care if Liam still thinks it isn’t finished, I don’t care if it isn’t perfect.
We applied for a phone, but back then you had to wait months, so when we finally got it in I sent my mother the number. I’d sent the address, but not right away, I’d taken my time to let her get over the shock of my leaving Robbie. I hadn’t told her about Liam; I thought I’d let her draw her own conclusions, which wouldn’t exactly be hard, for she’d know I wouldn’t have moved down South except for a reason, and if I didn’t so much as mention a name then the reason must be Catholic. I knew she wouldn’t like me leaving Robbie, for all she thought he wasn’t good enough. I’d married him, hadn’t I? I’d made my bed so I should lie on it. She was very strong on lying on your bed, was my mother, though the Presbyterian Church allows divorce. I waited, but she didn’t write back. I might as well have tossed a bottle into the sea.
About two months after I’d sent the phone number, a letter came with a Derry postmark. I knew the handwriting. I turned it over and over, then I put it on the dresser, and it looked at me for a couple of hours, till I lifted it down and opened it. A single sheet, the writing on one side only. She had written telling me not to be expecting any phone calls. I’d moved to a different country, she wrote, it was too expensive to phone.
I sat with the letter laid out on the table. Liam came in and asked who the letter was from, and I handed it to him. He read it through, which didn’t exactly take him all afternoon. I laughed, but he didn’t. Then he took my two hands in his, and the next thing I knew I was crying.
“She can say what she likes, I don’t care—it’s nothing to me,” I said. I was shaking my head from side to side, the tears flying off my face, which I couldn’t mop with Liam holding on to both my hands.
Liam didn’t speak, but he let go my hands and he put his arms round me and held me and stroked my hair.
“You’re a long way from home,” he said. So I cried and cried.
It wasn’t all like that. We had the usual rows—nothing spectacular, just run-of-the-mill complaints as we each of us discovered that neither one was as perfect as we’d let on. I thought when he said he’d do it tomorrow, he meant that he’d do it tomorrow; it took me a while to grasp that tomorrow meant sometime in the not-completely-distant future. For his part, he thought when I said tomorrow I meant sometime in the not-completely-distant future.
There were other things—I could make a list, but it wouldn’t be a long one. All couples have one—ours was shorter than most, and bit by bit we were learning each other’s ways. It’s this thing in me that comes between us, always has, always will. Yet that was what brought us together, for Liam understood it before ever I did, and more than that, he didn’t mind the way I was.
I changed down here. You change anyway, but I think the physical place that you live in makes for more difference than we sometimes allow. The buildings and streets of the city bring a particular alertness; the hard greyness sharpens the wits and the tongue, it hastens the feet. But the soft, dense colour of this place did its work on a sensual, physical level, sending me down from the mind and into the body, as rain finds the hollows and low places after long drought, filling them up so that they lose shape and turn into mud.
So it was for me. I lost shape, inwards and outwards. My feet pulled through mud and forgot to resist it.
There was a young one working in the supermarket in the town, a girl of maybe nineteen or twenty years of age. The first time I saw her I couldn’t get over her; I had to force myself not to stand and gawp, for she was the living, breathing spit of Robbie poured into a female form. After a while I got more used to seeing her, didn’t get the same shock. All the same, I could never entirely just shrug and pass her by.
One morning I was over at the fruit and veg picking out onions, and there she was, up ahead of me, lifting bunches of bananas from a box on a trolley and setting them out on the shelf. She turned and glanced in my direction. Her face was a Pierrot’s—a dead-white, painted-on, chalky mask. I looked around, but no one else was staring. Maybe there was something going on that I hadn’t heard about, some children’s thing in the town to do with face painting or mime. She was a bit old for face painting, but it could be she was the face painter and she’d used some
