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  Sometimes he plays nurses with the girl next door. He lies still as a doll while she jabs him with lollipop sticks until his willy stiffens in his trousers. In his head he is saying ‘Yes nurse,’ ‘It hurts just there,’ ‘Thank you nurse.’

  He is like St Bernadette of Lourdes. Except that he is a boy. And he hasn’t seen the Virgin Mary. And he doesn’t live in France. Can’t even speak French. But he is a saint, he knows that much for sure. Heard people say he was touched, people who thought he might be deaf as well as mute. It’s only one ear is deaf. The other one can hear just fine, thank you. He feels most holy when he stands at the window at dusk looking down at the lake. For it is a lake of holy water, healing water. Oh, to go there, but there is no going there anymore. Not even when the weather changes. Not even when he is grown.

  That lake water never got warm. But they used to go there, he and his older brother – as often as they could, and as soon as they could – not long after you could see your own breath, and before the air was abuzz with midges. Swimming near to the jetty was the thing, where you could feel the tadpoles nibble at your skin. It was a peculiar sensation, skin burning with the cold and them nibbling. They scooped the jelly into buckets and brought it home, to watch it turn. But they always just missed that moment when the spawn became full-grown frogs – too careless, too preoccupied, or too subtle a change to see, whatever it was.

  It was down there he had one of his visions, only he saw nothing. There was a moment when suddenly it got warmer, suddenly the birds were making more noise, more flutter, when the air became visible like a swarm, and he looked up at the chinks of sky between the trees as if they were blue bees. His head back until his neck cricked, his feet slowly sinking into the mulch. The insects humming, whirring. And the sound of Ben thwacking branches to either side of him with a stick. It was the sound of a small wood fire, but it wasn’t. It was Ben saying ‘Come on, we’ve got to find him,’ and pushing through the undergrowth. Then the noise stopped. He stooped to flit a stone across the lake. It sputtered, made a single ripple, and sank.

  He even went back and looked for Jake in the shed. As if they’d forgotten him, as if their wee brother hadn’t been with them only a few minutes before. It was that kind of vision: though he saw nothing, he could feel time running him round like a headless chicken. He looked in the old tumble drier – Jake’s favourite hiding place – but he wasn’t there.

  Of course he wasn’t. He was with Ben.

  But he wasn’t with Ben.

  He went down again to the jetty and found Ben on his hunkers looking for perfect skimming stones.

  ‘He’s about here somewhere,’ he said, ‘the little shite. He’s hiding.’

  That was the sort of thing could make you laugh, Ben talking like he was grown up. But he started to cry instead.

  They hid in the shed, looking at the pictures in their children’s bible, and in Ben’s comics, eating cola bottles and space ships. They said nothing. Wasps flittered in and out of their paper nest on the ceiling. Then Ben went behind the upturned table with the broken leg and John into the tumble drier. Soon his legs went dead. He liked it, and he liked the smell of dust and turpentine and unwashed vegetables. But he was scared too. Then he heard his father’s voice calling, and that was when he had his second vision. It was a smaller one than the first: he only got a kind of ringing in his ears, and the inside of the tumble drier went white with light for a second and then was dark again, darker than before. His father was calling ‘Be-en! Jo-ohn! Ja-ake!’, his voice all odd and tinny. Then the lid was off, and he was lifted free of the drier, his legs frozen and a horrible swelling pain in them that made him want to knock his knees from their sockets.

  ‘Where’s Jake?’ his father was saying. ‘Where’s Jake, where’s Jake, where’s Jake,’ and shaking him. Then shaking Ben.

  He never spoke after that. His mother went like a baby, like Jake used to be, with swollen eyelids and blubbery lips. Her tongue grew enormous, and her skin all blotchy. His father was jaundiced-looking. They both terrified him, as did the neighbours with their freshly laundered hankies and soapy hands, lifting him off the ground, lifting him on to their unfamiliar warm laps with tears swilling in their eyes. Ben was too old for sitting on laps. He didn’t want them touching him. He sat away from them – near their mother, always near her – and watched. It was after he had told them we only wanted to show Jake the frogs, only wanted to show him where they lived, take them grown up frogs back home. And after they’d gone to look, and then found Jake in the holy water, and sent him to the hospital, the one that’s closed now, and left him there for good.

  Then the bottom bunk was empty. John carried on talking to his baby brother anyway, just like he always did, except in his head. Words flooded through him, drowned him.

  Then his mother removed the bunk and replaced it with a single bed.

  He isn’t used to sleeping so close to the ground so he’s started bedwetting and falling out. Now he has a dark green plastic sheet he sleeps on so when he pees himself it doesn’t go down into the mattress. He hates the smell of his own pee. He hates the cold mackintosh feel of the under-sheet. It reminds him of this one time when they went up into the mountains and it rained and rained, and all they had to eat were Rich Tea biscuits. Sometimes he hears Ben crying and goes in his room and says ‘Ben’ and Ben says ‘What?’ and he says ‘Nothing’.

  His mother has taken to wearing a pendant around her neck with a little picture of Jake, which she kisses every night before bedtime. His mother tells him Jake is an angel up in heaven. He is the boy in the bottom bunk, underneath him; it’s hard to think of him up above. But he does. And he says prayers every night and asks him to look over him, even though he’s underneath. When he prays it is so quiet that he can hear moths flutter against the light in the hallway. And when he’s in bed the dim light through the window over the door stings his eyes, but he won’t let his mother turn it off. Then he hears her, and he closes his eyes tight, feeling her shadow move across them and the warmth of her body stooping over him. Her breath smells of cloves.

  ‘Are you sleeping, John darling? Are you? Don’t you worry, everything is going to be all right. Mammy loves you very much. You say a wee prayer for me, hah? And for Ben, and for Jake. You’re my little angel. What would I do without you? I’m awful tired …’

  The trick for getting rid of her is to moan and turn over on to his deaf ear so’s he can’t hear her anymore. He hates this mother who comes to him in the night.

  He needs one more vision to secure his place in heaven at the right hand side of God. It’s the only place will do, otherwise he’d feel like he was missing out. But the visions have all dried up lately. His front tooth is loose. That could be a sign. And the girl next door has stopped speaking to him. Maybe she senses something. They were supposed to get married, now she won’t even look at him. Maybe the next miracle is to stop his mother crying all the time. Then the whole neighbourhood would raise him up on eagle’s wings, make him to shi-ine like the SUN, he sings (in his head of course). Oh praise be to St John of the Miraculous Lake! He can hear them clear as day.

  He knows what to do. And so he gets himself a bucket from the shed, a long time after Jake has been away, and he makes his way down to the lake, the forbidden place. He doesn’t meet anyone he knows on the road. Safe over, and over the stile into the field that leads down to the swimming place. It is the place of the first miracle, the sacred place. He steps tentatively in, crouches down and drags the bucket through the water. One bucket of holy water is all it will take. One bucket will fill the whole basin where they used to keep the frogs. And then it will be the holy fount, and people will come to him to be healed. And he will heal his mother, and his father, and Ben. He will wash away their weirdness, Amen, Gloria in Eggshells! That’s what they’ll say at his first communion, when he’s brought up before the priest on the altar, bathed in light.

  The water is soaking through his trainers.

  Next thing
there’s somebody in the field, a flurry of colour running towards him. He turns his back on her. Maybe she won’t see him, or know it’s him. He needs more time. He needs to be able to get the water back up to the basin. But when he turns to look she’s still running, and it’s clear now that it’s his mother. He tightens his grip on the handle of his bucket. There’s mud on his hands. She’s nearer, scooping him up with words; then she’s here taking him right up in her arms. He clings, water splashing over the sides of the bucket onto his hands.

  ‘Put it down,’ she says, grappling with his fingers.

  It falls away, splashes into the water. Then he knows the only thing he can do is save her alone, so he slowly raises his eyes up to hers, lifts his muddy hand, and dabs her forehead with the holy water. He holds her, very quiet, very still, while her eyes dry into the lake.

  ‘Put it down,’ she says.

  MOLLY MCCLOSKEY

  Here, Now

  Out here, where home is – 12 miles from town, 132 from the capital, latitude 54 degrees 20 minutes, longitude 8 degrees 40 – we’re at the centre of our universe. Our peninsula: tiny feline tongue-flick into the endless liquid of the Atlantic. Cape Neurotic, breakaway republic, bandit country – all pet names, only the first of which I’ve ever understood. Much further north and you’re AWOL, into the too-high wilds of Donegal. But here, despite the silence, we seem not too far from anywhere. Silence that sometimes – like a climber’s nightmare, a hidden cleft – feels like the firm earth having suddenly given way beneath us, dropping us irretrievably into dark and hollow. Only an illusion; we’re on solid ground here. Nestled between mountain and shoreline, or rise and fall, able anytime to look left, or right, and be shown what it is we’re relative to.

  From where we are (as from a lot of places now), the new highways radiate like spokes from the hub we imagine here is, drilling past the now redundant, serpentine old laneways (recall: the shock of rod and spiral, side-by-side on the small slide, your very first turn at the microscope). Suggestion of stark choice, between what demands but rewards, and the line of least resistance. Roads hastening us in three directions, towards Galway, Dublin, Donegal. Roads referred to not by name but by order of appearance: Old and New. As though there would only ever be two versions of a thing, or ever one definitive account.

  SUMMER

  Reneged-on promise, spring’s failure to deliver, coitus interruptus of a season. Worse somehow than winter, which, at the very least, arrives. I haven’t learned it, the fine art of pessimism. How to stop expecting. Teach me, she wrote, before departing, what I have to have to live in this country.

  THE NEW ROAD

  Which you and I didn’t live to see. Lying in your upstairs bedroom all that dank summer of its construction, its tripartite beat tripping off our tongues. Eight-point-eight kilometres of sudden superhighway and right outside your door. The changes it would bring! As though it were the coming of the motor car itself. Here to there in no time flat; what we couldn’t do with a proper passing lane. How what for eons had been villages would overnight begin to feel like ‘suburbs’. We hadn’t much else to talk about, which doesn’t mean they weren’t good nights.

  Autumn, and someone else by then. Talk of the highway assumes the present tense. The local paper runs a front-page piece on how to navigate a roundabout. The Sunday drive assumes proportions it never dreamed of. A dual carriageway. Could the term be any more charming, or less appropriate? And each time a new one opens, we shave minutes off the trip to Dublin. As if through some polite willingness on our part to illustrate a proof of plate tectonics, we inch ever closer to the capital.

  THE OLD ROAD

  Despite my love of speed and the queer way that vast, industrial swath through the scree appealed to me, when coming to you I stuck instead to the old road. With its bad bends, its fog banks, its stray cows come upon round corners and our own agreement that the new way was far less arduous, the old nevertheless maintained a coy hold on my loyalty. As though to remind me of where I’d come from, or of the condition in which I’d first arrived at your door. Slow and inefficient, knotted.

  The old road bearing the weight and imprint of all those winter nights I travelled to and from you. Who I was, or who you were, on any given Friday. My stabs at perpetuity. My way of saying I’ll keep returning to wherever you are, somehow the same, somehow fortified against change, against age and the flux of season and the occasional fit of pique. My way of knowing that we have been here, again and again, at your huge hearth at the end of each workweek, swapping laconically the details of our lives. Who you pined for, or who I did. Long-distance liaisons. Sound advice. Constancy and repetition and yet the bloom of things too. For laconic as we were, we were not immune to wonder, imagining we saw our very souls ripen under the watchful eyes of time and mutual regard.

  HERE

  At dawn or on summer evenings, the landscape an inversion of itself, things assuming their complementary colours: a yellow sky; Benbulben, which I know to be green, now a deep magenta. Five hundred twenty-six metres high and always there, in its uncanny self-possession, its horizontal thrust, its air of presumption and demand. Depending on the light, the angle, my own mood: priapic jut, or extended arm ushering me in, and northward. And to the south, its other: dome to its mantel, afloat while it is all full steam ahead. Self-satisfied, too, but afterwards, and in repose. Flat on its back and pooling like an ample breast.

  PARKING DISCS

  To the introduction of which nothing definitive could be attributed. Not the end of an era, not the mark of our entry into the grown-up world of cineplexes, bottle banks, espresso bars and, yes, the sex shop. But something. A kind of attrition.

  In the beginning, we parked in cul-de-sacs or on the outskirts. Or we cheated – ‘recycled’ – carefully arranging on the dash hair squeegees, ballpoint pens or cigarette lighters over the already scratched squares of our tattered parking discs. We swapped tips on hidden spaces, as though they were undiscovered holiday destinations. (That private lot smack in the centre of town, some still-virgin corner of the world.) Gradually, though, we gave in. Learned to plan ahead. Bought in bulk packets of ten, and forgot there was ever a time when we didn’t have to pay to park.

  The papers say we are living in a boom town, and we feel it. We feel that weird, too-quick reversal of decay. And each time something picturesque and tumbledown vanishes and something baby blue or canary yellow or forest green rises in its place, we sense the presence of allegory. Allegory is among the words we don’t much use here, but we know enough to know when it’s among us. Each time we forget what once existed in any given place, we are visited by a vague unease, as though we have colluded in some dubious scientific advance.

  BEFORE …

  And in the company of some other you. Platonic too, but with whom so many roles were played. Who’s lost, who’s found, first me, then you. So that I’m waiting, uneasily, for the next reversal. Or better yet, the final incarnation of us: some sync finally fallen into, a place (on the far shore) where suspicion’s banished, ethanol extinct, and gratitude so deep-ingrained it isn’t necessary to refer to.

  That Christmas – our cold hands calcifying round our wine glasses in the icy studio of some mutual artist friend – we clung to one another in the corner like a pair of co-dependent limpets, guffawing over my latest half-remembered scrape, and you had the backhanded good grace to say to me: There’s a good woman going to loss in there. Two years later, some early-morning stint in your place, the heebie-jeebies now a spectator sport to me, and I’m trying hard to say the same to you – a good man – because it’s true. Because I never have, and still can’t.

  IARNRÓD ÉIREANN

  In the bathroom on the Sligo-Dublin railway line, a sign telling us how to turn on the water in the hand basin has been tampered with, so as to form a new message – the demanding, unheralded art of negative graffiti. Whole words scratched out, one ‘s’ artfully obscured, and what we’re left with is an in-joke with a world-view attached. T
hink of here: the affection with which ineptitude is regarded, the irony with which piety is infused. When visiting from abroad, if short on time and desiring to grasp this place in a sound bite, you might start here: To obtain water … pray.

  WHICH BRINGS US TO BORN-AGAIN VIRGINS

  A mini-movement growing up on the far side of the Atlantic: recant your past carnality, reclaim your prelapsarian self. A sort of sexual face-lift. This news courtesy of Radio Telefís Éireann, and relayed with all the ill-suppressed mirth that such American hokum incites. Some weeks later (also via RTE, though now with quizzicality in place of mirth), this news: that the Pioneers are offering a deal. Temperance, they’ve decided, can start anytime. Even here, it’s not about never anymore. Just two years without a drink and you too can wear the pin, be, as it were, born again. The brands of innocence we consider worth regaining. A juxtaposing that helplessly invites reduction: the difference between us is … that we dream of re-imagining our sex lives; you, of alcoholic chastity.

  … AFTER

  That I could hand to you – a good man, after all – the rebirth of wonder. The chastening effect of mental clarity, emotional acuity, keenness of sensation. Strictly bona fide fear. In a word (so hackneyed it hurts), sobriety. No longer awash in that amniotic fluid. See it shaken from you, like excess sea water upon emerging, the evolutionary being that is you heeding an unconscious call to a next echelon. Or your own tide out, brackishness receded, detritus exposed, the dropped hints of your life – still there – marking the way back. Equivocal treasures you’d glean then, ugly only to the untrained eye, like the bleached skulls we see on other people’s mantels, prized beyond reason for reasons other than themselves.