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Shadows
Will Fall
(Hodder and Stoughton, November 2004) |
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Opening
Chapter of Shadows Will Fall...
March,
2003. Dun Laoghaire.
----The
body was in the doorway of the morgue. The earlier bodies
had been left in morgue doorways too, but I didn't know that
then.That morning, with ceaseless rain pouring from an over-loaded
sky and the town for the most part asleep, all I saw was the
dead body of a young woman called Alannah Casey who had liked
cappuccino made with non-fat milk and no chocolate.
The dog shivered against me. A gull settled on the wall and
cawed. It was joined by a second, then a third. Those are
the things I remember most, clearly and in that order. First
her body, then the incessant, dark, disapproving rain on everything.
There had been weeks of it, though it was almost April and
supposed to be springtime. Then there was the state of the
dog and the vitriol of the gulls.
I've never liked gulls. I had been walking Lucifer, the dog.
He hated the rain and had wanted to stay indoors but I was
having none of that. The need to exercise him got me up and
out early and walking myself. I also had a business to run,
a coffee shop called The Now and Again Cafe.
Alannah Casey had been coming there for months to drink cappuccinos
with her boyfriend in the afternoon. Lucifer and I were doing
a circuit which took us past the back of the hospital that
morning. We'd abandoned the pier, which had been too wild,
and taken this as a route offering relative shelter. The rain
and early hour meant we were the only souls about. It wasn't
yet seven o'clock. The Irish are not a nation of early
risers.
The
dog saw, or perhaps sensed her, before I did. He had run ahead
of me, up Charlemont Avenue and through the back entrance
to the hospital. He'd been sniffing his way past a row of
staff cars when his tail went between his legs and he dropped
to his belly.
----"What's
wrong, Lucifer?"
I had to yell, what with the rain falling and an early, Wexford-bound
goods train hustling along the distant rail tracks. The Accident
and Emergency door was directly ahead and a stone angel on
the roof of Outpatients watched from my left. The morgue was
to my right, the row of cars blocking my view of the door.
----"What's
wrong?" I called again.
Lucifer was inching forward, whimpering. He was getting old,
my lovely Lucifer, arthritis working its way from one back
leg to the other. But he was still game and a player. Cowering
wasn't his style at all. He'd set up a low growl and was standing
again by the time I came up to him.
----"It's
all right," I said, holding his collar as we stood over
her body. He barked.
----
"Be quiet," I said.
Alannah Casey's face shone beautifully in the grey light,
oval shaped and achingly white in its frame of long, very
wet black hair. She was naked and lay on her back on the wheelchair
access slope, eyes fixed in dull wonder on the cloudy skies,
hands folded with childlike modesty over her pubic hair. There
were goose pimples on her arms and thighs.
She'd shone beautifully in life too, sure of how she looked
and seeming very in love with the young Russian she used to
meet for the cappuccinos. She'd been nineteen years old and
liked to wear leather jackets with low-slung jeans.
Nineteen. So close in age to my daughter Emer. But she
was someone else's daughter and for this I gave brief, fervent
and guilty thanks. Thankfulness was overpowered by guilt and
my legs ceased supporting me. I sat beside Alannah Casey on
the slope of cement and touched her poor dead face. The shock
of its cold stillness was terrible. The dog whimpered, keeping
carefully away from her.
I took out my mobile and phoned the garda station. My ex-husband
worked there so the number wasn't a problem.
I told the guard who answered where I was an what I'd found.
----"We'll
be with you right away," he said. He had a brusquely
reassuring country ------accent.
Midlands, I'd have said. "Don't go away," he added.
----"I'll
wait," I assured him.
I'd always fancied myself as someone with a grasp of what
it was to be human. But I'd never come up against humanity
at its most deceiving, ruthless and damaged. All of that was
about to change.I reached for the dog as the morning became
truly dark and the blood drained from my head. He started
to bark as I fainted.
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| Gambling
indeed (Hodder
and Stoughton, September 2003) |
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Opening
excerpt
---- The body was fat, female,
forty-eight years old and seven days dead. Its
yellowy grey flesh fell in folds on to the table and its face
was full of an
angry resentment. The mouth was pursed, ready to speak: death
had come
unawares.
----"Make the cut, Miss Cusack."
The dead woman was so very alone, so mercilessly exposed. What
had she been
thinking of, donating a body like hers?
----"We're waiting, Miss Cusack."
Let them wait, let him wait. The woman on the table was in no
hurry, palms
turned upwards and lumpy fingers curled and pleading. She'd
never been
pretty and death had done her no favours.
----"Maybe you would prefer
to observe, just for today?" The demonstrator was at
----her shoulder.
----"No, it's all right. I'll
do it."
Honor nodded without looking at him, afraid to take her eyes
off the body
now she was about to begin. She'd seen his demonstrating style
with other
students. He was helpful enough, in a detached sort of way.
Patient too,
after the same fashion. God alone knew how many bodies he'd
cut up in his
time as a surgeon and teacher. Better to learn to do it on her
own, from
the beginning. She ran a finger from one end of the clavicle
to the other,
wishing she'd been given a lower limb or foot to work on, to
be where she
could have avoided the woman's disappointed mouth.
Later
excerpt
----It's dangerous, they say, to
get what you wish for. Honor Cusack is in
danger of getting what she's long, and unconsciously, wished
for and of
proving the old adage right.
----I could see all of this yesterday,
Sunday, when she came to see me in the
late-afternoon. She was restless and didn't want to be with
me at all but I
provided a refuge of sorts. She'd been disappointed by her German
and was
still forlornly hoping he might appear.
I watched her as she paced my rooms. She was wearing a two-piece
costume in
Glen Check with a velvet collar and buttons. The skirt had three
pleats in
the front and three in the back and was short enough for me
to see where she
had a bandage on one knee. She'd bought the costume for thirty
coupons, most
of which were donated by me when she didn't have the £6.
10. 6d. it cost in
Switzers. The coupons were of no use to me anyway.
----"You're restless,"
I said at last.
----"Sorry." She sat
down in the Charles 11 chair brought with me from Skelfort
when I married Lionel. I didn't like her sitting there but at
least it kept
her back straight while she was speaking to me. She had coiled
and pinned
her hair up in a way that was new.
A woman changes when she falls in love with a man. It happened
to me and it
happened to Grace Danaher when, God help him, she fell in love
with my son.
Now it's happening to Honor Cusack. She has never been in love
before and is
confused and resisting. But love's madness has its way with
all of us and
she is no different from anyone else." |
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| Friends
Indeed (Hodder
and Stoughton, September 2003) |
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Opening
excerpt
August, l867. Dublin.
The smells were the first thing. The heavy, fetid stench of
animal sweat and fear and excrement, the evil smelling miasma
from the river Liffey.
----The stink that was Dublin.
---- They were what made me feel,
at last, that I was home.
---- 'Close up the window,' my
father said.
---- His eyes, bloodshot and weary
and watchful, were open again. He'd been asleep since leaving
the North Wall, tired as I was after the journey from Paris.
---- 'There's a herd of cattle
ahead of us,' he said, 'you'd no business unlatching it.'
---- 'I need air. The carriage
is stifling,' I said.
----'You don't need what passes
for air in this part of the town.'
---- His short, hairy fingers were
clamped on his knees as he leaned forward. He smelled in need
of a wash and of the wine he'd been drinking.
---- My poor father was not made
for travelling; he'd slept on the train journeys between Paris
and London and had been ill without stop on the boat crossings.
Middle
excerpt
Out,' he held the whip between his hands,' take yourself away
from here back to the degenerates you came from.' The whip,
of black, whining leather, quivered.
---- 'Come with me, Beezy,' I came
up behind her, 'there's nothing to be gained - '
---- 'I'm as entitled under God
have my say as this black-hearted divil is.' Beezy, shaking
off my hand and staring into the priest's bulging eyes, was
too brave by half. Either that or she was too foolish.
---- I would never have defied
those eyes myself; they were half mad with hatred and rage.
The other half was filled with a disbelief that he was being
defied, and by a woman.
---- 'God will not be mocked in
these streets.' The priest spoke slowly, each word ringing out.
'And nor will He be denied.' He turned to the growing crowd.
'You see in this woman the devil come among you to do his work...'
---- 'You're more of a devil than
I'll ever be.' Beezy's folded arms held her scarlet shawl across
her chest. The crown, mostly men, took a breath.
---- Beezy's head was high and
her back straight. With her hair piled high, washed in rain
water the day before and in shining coils on the top of her
head, she was almost as tall as the priest. The scar on her
face twitched but she was magnificent anyway, brave beyond anything
bestowed by the brandy.
---- 'I've met your kind before,'
Beezy went on, 'I've had them in my own bed and seen them panting
around the girls who worked for me. The single difference between
your kind and other men is that your kind are the greater liars.
Ye're event the greater hypocrites...'
---- The priest lunged.
Later
excerpt
---- I turned to look at him. I
thought about gathering his beloved body against me until, by
some miracle, the life that was mine might pass to him and he
might breathe again. But I couldn't do this either so I touched
his hands instead, where they'd been crossed on his chest by
the hospital priest. The atheist in him would have hated the
pose but rigor mortis had set in and there was nothing
I could do about it. I would not break his bones.
---- I traced the outline of his
mouth with my finger. I touched and tidied his hair back from
his forehead. He'd have liked me to do such things when he was
alive. I never had.
I closed my eyes, tightly, against the unbearable sight of him.
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| Fate
and Tomorrow
(Hodder
and Stoughton, 2002. Paperback edition, Coronet 2003)
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Opening
excerpt
The steamboat which took me upriver to
the station outpost at Pongara was called Le Roi Leopold.
The Africans called it kutu kutu, because of the sound
it made. It was long and narrow, with two decks. The Africans
also called it 'the house that walks on the water'.
-----The river was the River Congo
and it was wide and winding, alive with terrors, endless.
-----Even
on the upper deck of Le Roi Leopold, where there were
cabins for Europeans and Americans and awnings against the tropical
sun, the heat was like a leaden weight. It dried in my throat
when I breathed in, dried in the baking barricade of air when
I breathed out. The sky, on this second morning of my journey
upriver, was the same remorseless blue it had been the day before,
and on all of the days before that since my arrival in Africa.
-----
No one had told me about the sky, or the heat. Not really told
me. Nothing I'd heard or learned or read before coming had even
half-prepared me for the relentless nature of the African sun.
Nor for the teeming mayhem, the noise, the colours, the smells.
-----
The cruelties.
-----
The confusion I felt.
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The longing for home.
Later
excerpt
Very early one morning, at the end of
my first week at Pongara, a man came out of the forest. He crossed
the compound until he came to the clearing in front of the house.
When he was within a couple of feet he stopped and called Thomas
by name, twice.
-----
'Thomas Cooper!' His voice rose and echoed. 'Thomas Cooper!'
-----
From the window I watched him standing there, waiting. He was
carrying something wrapped in blue cloth. After a minute he
moved closer. When he got as far as the edge of the veranda
he leaned forward, opened the cloth and gently laid out two
human hands, both of them severed just above the wrist, on the
dusty boards.
-----
They were small. Children's hands. The curl of the fingers made
them seem to be pleading.
-----
I lifted my own hands to my face. The movement attracted the
attention of the man and he lifted his head. His eyes, staring
at me, might have been staring into hell. Thomas came out onto
the veranda and said something to the man, who gestured to the
hands. My husband replied by kicking them from the veranda.
He did this with enough force to send them some distance beyond
where the man was standing. The man, without a word, walked
stiffly to where they lay and returned holding them in front
of him. Tears fell in a river down his face.
-----
I went outside and stood behind Thomas.
-----
'Get back into the house.' He didn't turn and his voice was
thick. I stayed where I was. The man was looking at me again.
I was reminded of the mute pleading in the eyes of Kilgallen's
dog and couldn't have moved to save my life. |
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| Contemporary
Dublin - An article |
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There
are people in this city who spend entire Saturdays galloping
between shops and coffee bars. They're of both sexes and are
a huge component of the latterly meowing Celtic Tiger. I'm a
coffee drinking fan of cafe society myself, or at least of what
I imagine cafe society to be. I've sipped in Seattle, and in
Paris and Algeciras and have no bother telling the difference
between a latte and a negro. I've never felt out of it until
this weekend.
Saturday being the rare, Indian summer day it was coffee drinkers
were spilling out and onto pavements all across town. I joined
them in a teeming, languorous Anne Street. So teeming I had
to share a table. A small boy with big ears and spiky hair stood
a few feet away playing an accordion. He refused to go away,
even when given a £1 coin. It was that sort of morning. I read
the latest on the War Against Terrorism while I waited, a long
time, for a black coffee. It's unlikely, as bombs fell on Afghanistan
and anthrax panic gripped the US that either side was thinking
much about the fact that it was the Arabs, in 805 A.D. who first
discovered the stimulating effect of the coffee bean.
The name itself very likely comes from the Arabic qahwah, or
it may have been named for the town of Kaffa, in Ethiopia, where
coffee was first brewed. Right up until the end of the 17th
century the bean was grown mostly in Yemen, in southern Arabia.
By then the coffee house as phenomenon had arrived and spread
across Europe. So stimulating was the English variety that Charles
11 called them 'seminaries of sedition' and ordered coffee houses
in his kingdom closed down in 1675. This didn't last long. Public
demand had them reopened and beans roasting again within a week.
By the end of the century the news of the day was spread principally
via gossip in the city's more than 2,000 coffee houses. I've
no idea how many coffee houses or bars there are in 21st century
Dublin, just know they're growing and multiplying. I'd no idea
either, until Saturday, how seditious Dublin cafe society could
be. Enlightenment and my coffee came together. The following,
as I sipped alone and nosy, was what I heard at my table. Not
a word's superfluous and not a word's been taken out.
-----'I'm really, seriously tired,'
said the woman nearest,
-----'I really, seriously don't
want all this stuff about September 11th coming at me.
I've had enough of it. Night and day, everything's either before
or after September 11th. I'm having a hard enough time getting
my head around buying in Spain.'
-----'Don't let it get to you,'
counselled her friend across the table, as fit and lovely an
example of healthy living and coffee drinking as her friend.
They were having cappuccinos with glasses of still water on
the side.
----- 'I decided when they started
talking about war that life was for the living and the thing
was to get on with it. Anyway, if you think people here are
a pain you want to hear what Charles has to say about Paris.'
----- 'Haven't seen him since September
10th. What was he doing in Paris?'
----- 'Something to do with the
Prix de l'arc de Triomphe. He said there's no life anywhere
in the city. The whole place was f...ing dead.'
----- 'The French are too serious
by half. Did I show you the stilettos I bought this morning?'
An ankle boot with four inch heel appeared on the table.
----- 'Worth every penny of £200
but I got them for half that.'
----- 'You did well,' the waiter
(Australian, close hair cut, biceps) delivered the scone I'd
ordered. -----'Won't do you any
favours when it comes to getting out of Dublin though.'
----- 'What're you talking about?'
The boot's owner looked prettily confused.
----- 'I'm talking about when Sellafield
goes up and you have to bail the hell out of here,' the waiter
was certainty itself.
----- 'The road's are going to
be blocked. Walkers will have the day. Wouldn't give you much
chance in those.' He upended the boot and held the heel close
to his nose.
----- 'Me, I'm going home. The
southern hemisphere's the place to be when the real bombs start
falling. '
----- 'What do you mean when Sellafield
goes up?' the second woman said.
----- 'Don't encourage him,' the
first took the boot from the waiter and put it back in its bag.
----- 'It's the next big bang,'
the waiter said, 'Osama bin Laden's lot are going to get back
at the UK and Sellafield's their target. Dublin will be wiped
out. Sure as I'm standing here and your boot's in that bag.
Don't you have a plan?'
----- 'No.' The small musician
began an octave-defying version of 'The Fields of Athenry'.
----- 'Crazy,' the waiter shook
a sad head,
----- 'new boots and no plan. Life's
about priorities, ladies. What you should be working on is how
you'll get south, only direction the stuff won't carry in the
wind. Cork airport and away. You're lost otherwise.'
----- 'When is this going to happen?'
----- 'Don't encourage him...'
----- 'Any day now,' he tucked
their bill discreetly under the sugar bowl and advanced on the
musician who moved off, defiantly howling about the loneliness
of those fields.
-----'What did I tell you?' the
first woman looked exhausted.
----- 'This city isn't fit to live
in any more. I've worked my butt off for the last four years
and do I get for it? Recession and war and creeps like that
taking over the place.'
----- 'What's happening about Spain?'
----- 'I'm looking at two places
in Marbella, about £200,000 apiece. You still interested?'
----- 'He said go south, didn't
he?' Could be the tail's been wagging the Celtic Tiger all the
time and no one's noticed. Coffee trees, by the way, are classified
as genus Coffea of the family Rubiacceae (madder). |
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